Fixing Booting Problem with Kernel 6.2.x on Fedora with Thinkpad X220

Long story short, this is just a simple notes that I will write for myself.

My Thinkpad X220, has been using Fedora since 2021 with kernel 5.x.x, but since 3 days ago (29 April 2023), I got a problem, where I can’t even boot with new kernel, because soft lock CPU. Fortunately, there are still working kernel that’s installed on my machine, so can can kept booting with older kernel, but It bug me so much, making me curious why it happen in the first place. I also remember that fedora doesn’t have LTS kernel, so if I’m stuck now, I can’t even upgrade to Fedora 38 (I don’t want say goodbye to fedora on my Thinkpad X220, that’s why… I MUST FIND THE ANSWER!). I started with throwing a lot of question in reddit, thinkpad forum, fedora forum, and lastly #fedora@libera IRC. The 2 of all those chanel, help me pin down the problem, it’s thinkpad forum and #fedora@libera (IRC never failed me! honestly! I don’t get why people use telegram and discord for chat).

I test a lot of kernel parameter with kernel 6.2.7 and 6.2.8, nothing works, I can’t even get the boot log. Akik, a user frm #fedora, help me to fix this problem by informing me, there are new kernel 6.2.9, probably you can test that out. I do test it, and nothing works.. But I can generate boot log that show DRM error ([drm:drm_atomic_helper_wait_for_dependencies [drm_kms_helper]] ERROR flip_done timed out and 915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] ERROR flip_done timed out) and akik points out, that we can try add kernel param that’s suggested in the thread [1][2]. In the end, there are only one kernel parameter that make it boot, also supporting AHCI in the process, it’s


intremap=off

in long cmdline, the boot parameters are

$ cat /proc/cmdline
BOOT_IMAGE=(hd0,gpt2)/vmlinuz-6.2.9-200.fc37.x86_64 root=UUID=b76d6809-a8ab-41fb-9e27-cfbbed48e5b7 ro rootflags=subvol=root rhgb quiet intremap=off
$ grep rhgb /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rhgb quiet intremap=off"

The problem lies on the i915/intel igpu. I still can’t say what is the problem, but the bug went away with AHCI enabled and that kernel flags added. For now, there are still opened ticket regarding this problem https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2182684, and I still wait from the Fedora team, at least Red Hat team to investigate it. Well Thinkpad X220 is 13 years old at this point, but this machine still rock solid for me to do my profesional works, so I don’t plan to change to new machine soon. I still wait the price of T480 to drop in Indonesia, because it can handle 64gb of ram, which I think I need in the future. Anyway thanks to akik and ledeni that help me in #fedora@libera, it’s always a great channel to ask, and got fast responds.

Source of answer :
[1] https://askubuntu.com/a/1286906
[2] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1937729#p1937729

By ben

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