To cut a long story short,
acpi=ht
isn’t the magic solution. Although much more stable than before, stable
enough to get X windows up and running, it still fell foul of the same
runaway kacpidACPI
causing the problems. A quick look back through the dmesg
output showed only very minimal portions of the ACPI
code enabled. Immediately obvious was the output describing the LAPIC and IOAPIC
setup. Both of these shared one very important feature: They could be
individually disabled from the kernel command-line for testing.
problem eventually. It had to be another part of
Rebooting with noapic
appended to acpi=ht
appeared again to be successful. After eight hours of constant use
under heavy load (recompiling more optimised packages) the system was
stable. Could this be the solution? Was the IOAPIC
to blame?
A final reboot would
confirm my suspicion: Remove acpi=ht entirely and leave
only noapic on the kernel command-line. Another twenty
hours later and this is being typed on what is seemingly a stable
system.
Hopefully this will save
somebody some time.
