Here’s another post PreUpgrade task after my Fedora 15 to 17 upgrade. This one was more serious as it was slowing my boot to a crawl, in fact sometimes boot simply hanged. However, I am not sure if this was really due to upgrading to F17 since my F15 was having boot issues before and I didn’t bother to investigate.

Do you see a similar message in your boot log or in dmesg? (number of seconds and name vary)

BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 22s! [biosdevname:590]

If yes, most probably your boot crawls or even halts and it’s due to the biosdevname package. A quick solution is to just remove the package.

sudo yum erase biosdevname

It is only used to map network interfaces to new naming scheme. It is not that critical especially if you’re not running a server with dependencies on multiple network interfaces.

sudo yum info biosdevname
Name        : biosdevname
Arch        : x86_64
Version     : 0.3.11
Release     : 6.fc17
Size        : 32 k
Repo        : fedora
Summary     : Udev helper for naming devices per BIOS names
URL         : http://linux.dell.com/files/biosdevname
License     : GPLv2
Description : biosdevname in its simplest form takes a kernel device name as an
            : argument, and returns the BIOS-given name it "should" be.  This is necessary
            : on systems where the BIOS name for a given device (e.g. the label on
            : the chassis is "Gb1") doesn't map directly and obviously to the kernel
            : name (e.g. eth0).

However, if your system won’t boot at all. You can skip the issue by adding biosdevname=0 in the kernel parameters.

Edit grub just before boot.

linux /vmlinuz-3.4.4-5.fc17.x86_64 root=/dev/mapper/vg_georgie_root-lv_root ro rd.lvm.lv=vg_georgie_root/lv_swap rd.md=0 rd.dm=0 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYTABLE=us rd.luks=0 rd.lvm.lv=vg_georgie_root/lv_root LANG=en_US.UTF-8 rhgb quiet biosdevname=0

Hopefully, your system starts up successfully. Then, remove the biosdevname package.

sudo yum erase biosdevname

If you want more details for clarity or confusion, here are some links. ;)