Infohit

Solution: Give the VM plenty of memory and turn on 'IO APIC'

This was my first attempt at installing Debian, having used RedHat and Gentoo in the past and currently using Ubuntu, so I was a bit dissapointed when it wouldn't boot. 

The problem occurred when installing from the netinst ISO, the installation process itself was smooth, I installed the option to have all the system in one LVM partition and chose Desktop and Laptop tools. The Sun Virtualbox virtual machine had a 30 GB VDI with 768 MB. I had selected the Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop (Bridged adapter, eth0) network adapter as I had found that this seemed to improve the network performance of the guest. On occasion, using the NAT option I have had the CPU usage go to 100% and network performance drop off completely.The host was Windows XP SP3.

On first boot, I found that the operating system wouldn't boot. I was just getting a kernel panic.

Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal exception in interrupt

I first tried to use the netinst cd as a rescue disk and run apt-get update && aptitude dist-upgrade,  a few components where upgraded, such as CUPS, but there was no kernel update - so no improvement there.

To solve the problem, and get reliable booting, I found I had to give the VM 1G of memory and turn on 'IO APIC'. This is the first Linux installation I have needed IO APIC for, although it alway seems to be necessary for Windows family installations. The Virtualbox documentation explains that its a more expensive emulation to do IO APIC, so I hope this apparent need for IO APIC in the distributed Lenny kernel goes away.