Comment 18 for bug 352197

Folks, as many of you I was plagued by the timeout issue, mostly when booting or resuming from standby/hibernate. I am running 8.10 on a Dell XPS M1330. I recently updated the kernel from 2.6.27-12 to 2.6.28-15 and since then the freeze occured more often. I followed the recommendations in this thread which did not cure the problem. I tried blacklisting ahci and use ata_piix in initramfs as well as switching from AHCI to ATA in BIOS. So it seems that the cause is not a fault in the ahci driver.

By chance I came across a similar discussion in the Nvidia forum. There it was suggested that problem might be due to having nvidia and ahci modules on the same IRQ, see http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=123583 and http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=126152. I followed the advice by zkmyth to ensure that nvidia does not have to share an interrupt, and this seem to have solved the problem (see attached /proc/interrupts). No freezes since then.