On Monday 28 May 2007, Michael Buesch wrote:

quoted

Can you give 2.6.16 a try? The diff is not that big and we might
be able to find out what broke if you find out 2.6.16 works.
You can also try later kernels like .17, .18, .19 to further
reduce the patch. (You could also git-bisect, if you have the time).

I did some testing and compiled some kernels and here are the results:

I was able to find out what causes the problems for me.  I did build two 
2.6.21.3 kernels, and one does work fine and the other doesn't.

This is a diff of the kernel configs I used:

--- /usr/src/linux-2.6.21.3-oldconfig1/.config  2007-05-28 13:41:15.000000000 
+0200
+++ /usr/src/linux-2.6.21.3/.config     2007-05-28 14:46:08.000000000 +0200

@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 #
 # Automatically generated make config: don't edit
 # Linux kernel version: 2.6.21.3
-# Mon May 28 13:41:15 2007
+# Mon May 28 14:46:09 2007
 #
 CONFIG_X86_32=y
 CONFIG_GENERIC_TIME=y

@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@
 #
 # General setup
 #
-CONFIG_LOCALVERSION="-oldconfig1"
+CONFIG_LOCALVERSION=""
 CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO=y
 CONFIG_SWAP=y
 CONFIG_SYSVIPC=y

@@ -108,9 +108,9 @@
 #
 # Processor type and features
 #
-# CONFIG_TICK_ONESHOT is not set
+CONFIG_TICK_ONESHOT=y
 # CONFIG_NO_HZ is not set
-# CONFIG_HIGH_RES_TIMERS is not set
+CONFIG_HIGH_RES_TIMERS=y
 # CONFIG_SMP is not set
 CONFIG_X86_PC=y
 # CONFIG_X86_ELAN is not set

The -oldconfig1 is the kernel that had no problems and the other shows the b44 
problem. So if High Resolution Timer Support is disabled everything works 
fine and if I enable it the problems do appear again.

I didn't test this on my 2.6.22-rc3 kernel yet, but I guess disabling High 
Resolution Timer Support will also solve the problem there.

The older kernels I tried also work perfectly fine and they didn't have the 
High Resolution Timer Support yet.