Another success story with 2.6.27, that may be helpful for those
searching for EPIA Ubuntu problems:

I was trying to move a bunch of low-power EPIA Mini-ITX-based servers to
8.04 (from 6.04 that has been running without problems literally
24/7/365 since day one), and had enormous problems. The target was to
boot and run the OS from a 2 GB USB flash and then utilize the EPIAs
internal HW enrcypting to handle SATA disks for 100% data, making it
simple to optimize disks (and overall power consumption) as the HW gets
cheaper and disk space needs go up.

The basic server 8.04 had to be installed on IDE disk first, straight
installation to USB failed all the time, with the kernel going to la-la-
land. Even to do the IDE installation (with somewhat older Samsung 20 GB
spare drive), I needed noapic & nolapic flags, together with the
"traditional EPIA" acpi=off.

After IDE->USB memory stick image transfer, the system halted repeatedly
usually without a trace, sometimes also with spectacular console kernel
dumps, usually during a simple apt-get to the USB partition.  Switching
the EPIA BIOS to USB 1.1 only did not help, just made things awfully
slow.

The good news is that I switched to use 2.6.27 generic kernel as per the
note above, and now the system has been doing very extensive IO both to
USB and SATA disks continuously for four days without problems, with USB
2.0 active. Earlier "top score" was just a couple of hours, even when
idling.

So this new kernel seems to have good karma on it, at least on VIA EPIA
1200 MHz Model EN board.

As mentioned, I still have flags "acpi=off noapic nolapic" at menu.lst.
The latter ones probably obsolete now that I boot from USB disk.

Also, /etc/modules needed:

apm power_off=1

To shutdown the power cleanly on 8.04. Worked OK out of the box on all
earlier Ubuntus so far.

Also, many earlier discussions about EPIA and Ubuntu suggest to add this
to /etc/modprobe.d/aliases:

alias longhaul off

These have been set for me even before the kernel change, and I will not
bother to check if they are still needed, as my usage is pure "always
on" server only.

My question is: is this 2.6.27 kernel coming to 8.04 in the future, or
will it only be part of Intrepid?

What kind of update problems may I encounter by "jumping" into this new
kernel?

As a minor side effect, something breaks with appArmor (with bind9 and
mysql-server packages) when this kernel is installed. Complains about
"Profile version not supported by Apparmor module".

Looks somewhat, but not entirely like bug 227046, but naturally I HAVE
booted into the new kernel, uname -a says:

Linux lua 2.6.27-1-generic #1 SMP Thu Aug 14 15:46:04 UTC 2008 i686
GNU/Linux

In the near future, I will try the same new setup on a very old EPIA-M
board.

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complete freeze during access of pccard/usb adapter
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/234084
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