Fedora 18 and Bug 529153

[Gordan Bobic]

Hi,

I'm trying to install F18 and I am falling foul of bug 529153. The 
problem is to bad on my EVGA SR2 that the installer pretty much locks 
up. If I boot with "noapic noacpi nosmp" I can get the installer to 
complete most of the time, and with the same options I can get the 
machine to boot, but the console is unusable, and the frame buffer based 
Xorg flickers badly enough that it would be a serious health hazard for 
anyone suffering from epilepsy.

I have tried to find a way to disable pciehp, but there appears to be no 
kernel option for it. It is built into the kernel so it cannot be rmmod-ed.

I don't particularly care about hotplug (nor do I imaging most Fedora 
users do, yet this has been built into the kernels since at leat F11 for 
some unfathomable reason, and that is how far back the mentioned bug 
report goes).

I got the latest kernel kernel-3.7.5-201.fc18.src.rpm and doctored it to 
remove CONFIG_HOTPLUG_PCI, more or less achieved by:

cat config-generic.orig | \
sed -e 's/^\(CONFIG_HOTPLUG_PCI_.*\)=.*/# \1 is not set/'

Built it on RHEL6 (because I cannot get a F18 box up and running) 
without debuginfo, tools, and signing, installed that, and F18's systemd 
then just gets stuck at boot time when it's supposed to get Xorg up and 
running. Keyboard seems to be responding (numlock works) but no response 
from any keys, looks like it gets stuck somewhere before it starts up 
the VTs.

Has anybody come up with a viable workaround for this that results in a 
usable system?

Gordan