CPU stalling on a Razer Blade During Installation

Question

I've recently downloading Loki and I've tried to install it like one would. However it seems I've run into a few problems. Before I get into anything, I'm running on a Razer Blade 2016 with a 6700HQ and a 970m, I have a feeling NVIDIA could be the problem.

Whenever I begin the installation, it runs for a few seconds, then gives me the following script:

ath10k_pci 0000:3b:00.0: could not fetch firmware file 'ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/firmware-5.bin': -2

After this, gives me this line

NMI warchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU #(x) stuck for (2y)s! [plymouthd:253] where x is whatever CPU core and y is number of seconds

If it displays anything after the soft lockup, it will tell me that

Systemd-udevd:989 blocked for more than 120 seconds

I'm not quite sure where to go from here, I hope someone can help, thanks in advance!

Answer 1

For the messages you indicate, I can see two problems.

The first of them is about the wireless card (Atheros ath10k). The boot process can't find the firmware file named firmware-5.bin. There are some forks to the official driver. So, using them, you can copy the necessary files to yor system. You can find more information in the following Stackexchange Q&A:

Problem with Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174

About the second message, the 6th gen chipset in Razor Blade 2016 isn't well supported until kernel 4.7. Loki is based on kernel 4.4, so a possible solution should be to upgrade the kernel to 4.7 release. You can find some articles about upgrading kernel in ubuntu 16.04 based distros, like elementary OS Loki.

But this upgrade can become unstable your system, so try before a possible solution installing Loki with some options about graphics card, adding

i915.preliminary_hw_support=1 nolapic nouveau.modeset=0

to the grub line on instalation drive.

More info and source of this trick at:

Installing Ubuntu 16.04 on Razer Blade (2016)

I hope this help to spend a good time with elementary and that fanstastic machine.