Hi, I wanted to file a bug report, but I don't know which package the issue belongs to.
The computer is a IBM Thinkpad R40e. Currently Debian 8 is installed. Ever since Debian 8 was installed on the harddrive I had to add acpi=off to the kernel options, otherwise the computer does not boot. No other acpi/clock/irq option mentioned on Internet works. Blacklisting the acpi_cpufreq or any other acpi* module does not fix the issue. The Debian 8 live CD image used to install the system does not have the issue. The previous OS was Debian 7 Wheezy and it did not have the issue. Now I'm trying to upgrade to Debian 9 by reinstalling the system from scratch. I've downloaded the debian 9.0.0 netinst install. The netinst image is copied with command dd to an USB key. The computer boots on the key and the first menu appears. I select "Graphical Install". The light on the USB key blinks a few minutes. After a while, the screen goes black with a static(=not blinking) text cursor in the corner. No disk, USB or other activity visible. No reaction to Ctrl+Alt+DEL or any keypress. The computer is stuck in that state and only a poweroff (hold powerbutton 4 sec) does work. Pressing TAB in the menu when "Graphical Install" is highlighted and adding acpi=off to the kernel options does prevent the lock and allows the graphical installer to start. I repeated the same steps with the Debian 8.6.0 netinst image and the issue is not present (at least not until Debian is installed on the hard drive). I guess there was some change in kernel config after the Debian 8 live cd/netinst images were built. This change prevents the default kernel from booting on the Thinkpad R40e. This change is now part of the Debian 9.0.0 netinst image. -- Olivier F. R. Dierick o.dier...@piezo-forte.be