I previously reported an early boot crash on an Inspiron 1545 laptop; see previous posts for more details. I used the parameters "debug vga=6 earlyprintk=vga" to catch these errors since they happen so early in boot that the normal console has not yet initialized. A picture of the crash dump from 2.6.37-rc2 is available here (2.6.36 crash is identical except for the reported kernel version): http://c02ware.com/bugs/dump_c7ff0d9c92435e836e13aaa8d0e56d4000424bcc.jpg I have experienced similar problems on a small number of other systems also. After confirming that the problem was introduced going from 2.6.35 to 2.6.36, I have successfully bisected the kernel, and narrowed down and tested to verify the commit which introduced the problem. Reverting this commit fixes 2.6.36 but 2.6.37-rc2 has the exact same crash even if I revert it. I don't know what to do from here, but someone with more knowledge can surely guide me. I will only have the unit to test with for another day or two. I have attached a suitable .config for reference as well. The commit info is below. Jody Bruchon --- The commit which caused the problem in 2.6.36: commit c7ff0d9c92435e836e13aaa8d0e56d4000424bcc Author: TAMUKI Shoichi Date: Tue Aug 10 18:03:28 2010 -0700 panic: keep blinking in spite of long spin timer mode To keep panic_timeout accuracy when running under a hypervisor, the current implementation only spins on long time (1 second) calls to mdelay. That brings a good effect, but the problem is the keyboard LEDs don't blink at all on that situation. This patch changes to call to panic_blink_enter() between every mdelay and keeps blinking in spite of long spin timer mode. The time to call to mdelay is now 100ms. Even this change will keep panic_timeout accuracy enough when running under a hypervisor.