lockups with 2.4.2x

[evil <evil@g-house.de>]

Hi y'all,

i am in the need of some help tracing down mysterious lock-ups of my
machine. with any vanilla kernel above 2.4.19 the machine boots, the it
will take 1 to 3 minutes and the machine freezes. no Oops on the
console, no warnings (e.g. no high load or mem-pressure), even SysReq is
not working.

i've already setup a script, writing

/proc/modules|locks|ksyms

to the disk every 2 seconds, because i suspected some 3rd party module i
usually load to be the reason for the freezes. but it was not. please
tell me, if other files are more interesting for this or what else i can
do to get to the source to the problem.

the machine:
Dual Athlon, 1GB RAM (HighMem enabled), gcc 3.3.1, libc 2.3.2,
(Debian/Testing) some more infos are on:

http://nerdbynature.de/bits/freeze/config|cpuinfo|dmesg|lspci

(directory listing follows...)

I really appreciate some help here, i don't know where to start
searching since no errors are shown :-(

below are some further infos, but i don't know if they are related to
this issue.

Thank you for your time,
Christian.

before this whole mess i was using 2.4.19, but i wanted to upgrade to
2.4.20, 2.4.21, did not make it, due to lack of time or need. 2.4.19 was
running fine. but i need netfilter now, so i had to recompile
modules+kernel!  but, mysteriously, i fail to recompile my 2.4.19. i did
"make mrproper", then even untar'ed a new archive, took the old config,
"make oldconfig" went ok. then
"make dep bzImage modules modules_install" stops within "bzImage":

net/network.o(.text+0xf125): In function `rtnetlink_rcv':
: undefined reference to `rtnetlink_rcv_skb'
make: *** [vmlinux] Error 1

there was another issue with a vanilla 2.4.19, but i tried to fix it:

http://nerdbynature.de/bits/freeze/semaphore.c.patch

hm, is this gcc related? it did not like some missing "" terminations.
ok, after fixing this, the error above showed up.

so, i thought it was time to try 2.4.2x (now 2.4.22), but am somehow
stuck now. on some completely other machines (PPC32 + single
AMD/Athlon), 2.4.2x are running very fine.