Irfan’s Corner on the Web On Mac, Linux, Grid, Virtualization and Software Technology

6Feb/074

Work arounds for the mysterious openSuse 10.2 lock-up on Dell Inspiron 6400

Since I installed openSuse 10.2, I've had an extremely annoying problem. The problem was that mostly when I started my machine,  the booting process would jam at the place where it says "Activating Device Mappings" or "Loading Kernel Modules". I've asked about this twice on the opensuse official forums, they are aware of this, but they say the occurence is so rare that it never got investigated! Sometimes it used to happen that openSuse 10.2 would keep continually hanging at the boot process, that I would simply restart into Windows.

However since I removed Windows from my laptop, it was imperative for me to find a solution, and I have! :D

There are three primary work arounds to avoid the mysterious lockups:

  1. Disable ACPI: This has worked for me pretty well, to do this you just have to pass the acpi=off to the boot parameters to the kernel, this disable power management; The software can no longer tell if it is running on battery or AC power, and the worst side-effect of it was that it disabled multiple cores! I have a Core Duo Processor, with this solution it detected only a single processor. I reported this effect to the openSuse mailing list, they speculated that the boot lockup problem may be related to my power system.
  2. Disable DMA: This has worked aswell, just pass ide=nodma to the boot parameters and it disables direct memory access from the hard disk to the memory hence involving the processor in every memory transfer. In this solution, I noticed a slight performance degradation which was obviously due to disabled DMA, but atleast openSuse started!
  3. The third I discovered today! From a friend who happens to run the same installation on the same hardware. He discovered a work around this problem which I will use from now on: As it does not involve disabling any kernel features. Just enable Wifi/bluetooth, and the kernel boots properly! If its not enabled the boot process locks up!

Whatever solution you choose to adopt, it eventually means that you can be assured that from now on, everytime you boot up a Dell Inspiron running openSuse 10.2 it will not lockup in the boot process!

PS. This problem is not present in openSuse 10.1, and other distributions I've tried on the notebook.

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  • http://blog.agileware.net Justin Freeman

    Mate, I had a serious problem with my laptop and Ubuntu (Ubuntu wipes the bios and kills the laptop) which resulted in my move to OpenSUSE. I have a Dell Inspiron 6400 with Core Duo and it’s relatively new etc. etc.

    Have you tried updating the Dell Bios? There have been at least 4 updates since I received mine (

  • http://deadcabbit.blogspot.com deadcabbit

    I don’t really say things like these, but this is Linux: first check if your hardware is supported and if not, do *NOT* buy (unless M$ is fine for you)… And of course disabling acpi is a bad idea, imho disabling dma is even worse.

  • http://www.home-of-linux.org/work-arounds-for-the-mysterious-opensuse-102-lock-up-on-dell/ Work arounds for the mysterious openSuse 10.2 lock-up on Dell

    [...] Blog Post [...]

  • http://info.hacktalk.org/info/520/work-arounds-for-the-mysterious-opensuse-102-lock-up-on-dell/ Hacks, Information, and More » Work arounds for the mysterious openSuse 10.2 lock-up on Dell

    [...] Blog Post [...]

  • http://irfanhabib.wordpress.com/ irfanhab

    @deadcabbit

    If you read my previous posts you would know that openSuse supports every single hardware in the Dell Inspiron notebook, and 10.1 did not have the lock-up problem neither did other distributions I tried, it came with OpenSuse 10.2!

  • Thomas

    I have the same problem with my Fujitsu-Siemens 1520 will tryout your suggestion enabling wifi at boot. Thanx in advance if it helps!

    Greetings from Finland