2.9.2 LinuxCNC Dell XPS 15 loading ramdisk - out of memory

Finally decided to bite the bullet and build a CNC router after dreaming about it for two years. After looking at centroid and grbl, decided linuxcnc would be the best option for me

I'm trying to run the LinuxCNC 2.9.2 Debian 12 ISO on a dell XPS 15 9550 2016 with a windows 10 dual boot. Installation goes smoothly.

Whats wrong:
When I try to boot into linux via GRUB I get "loading initial ramdisk" followed immediately by "error: out of memory" and a crash dump.

The odd thing is, I was able to install and run regular Debian 12 perfectly fine. The live USB version of LinuxCNC 2.9.2 also boots perfectly fine.

What I've tried
I am fairly new to linux so I'm not sure if I'm missing anything obvious. I spent nearly a full day trying to troubleshoot this on my own to no avail. Things I've tried: updating GRUB, partition reformat and reinstall multiple times, increasing swap partition to equal ram size (16gb swap, main partition ~80gb), disabling ACPI, adding "dis_ucode_ldr" (though I have no clue what either of those are), verified BIOS settings are set as recommended for the XPS 15 (secure boot off, UEFI, sata set to AHCI) . Recovery mode does nothing, I've tried searching through these forums for anyone with similar issues but couldn't find any relevant posts mentioning "ramdisk" crash on boot.

Wasn't able to find the error log, either because of my inexperience with linux or because it doesn't exist (because it crashes before it can write the log?), apologies for posting log as pictures.

Any help or further direction would be appreciated, I'm a bit lost as to what to try and where to look next.

Tried with ACPI=off and pci=biosirq, didn't change much. Again, apologies for errors as garbage quality images

Usually on a normal linuxcnc install you don't see the kernel messages as the kernel command line (boot options) has a the quiet switch which suppresses the kernel boot messages, which are a normal part of the boot process.

Personally I can't remember the last time I saw an "out of memory" message.

What makes it even harder is the message you are referring does not appear in the pictures.

One thing of note, laptops are not really suitable for Linuxcnc, it's mentioned some where in the docs. If you want to play around and get a feel fro it, I'd install VirtualBox or similar and use that. Or just run a live session.

If you still insist on installing Linuxcnc on this machine I'd use the google search term "XPS 15 9550 2016 linux out of memory issue" or some such term. On a hunch it could be a UEFI (and or Windows issue) which is really beyond the scope of this forum. And to tell the truth the last time I regularly used windows was in the Vista days.

Corn-
Understood, appreciate the response. I did see that laptops can have some issues with latency with LinuxCNC due to power interrupts. This laptop in particular has been sitting on my shelf for a while and owes me nothing which is why I figured its worth a shot to install and run a latency test on it. Worst case I'll give up and buy a salvage desktop or Raspberry. Off the live USB without adjusting any settings I get latency of ~250k-300k peak which sounds like its not ideal but passable when hardware stepping. I intend to use a mesa 6i25+7i78 board.

I removed the quiet option when I was trying to debug on my own, hoping it might give more insight as to the cause of the issue. I didn't include the grub error message since I figured it wasn't really of any value, attached a screenshot of the error pre-kernel on this reply

I have searched for issues memory issues relating specifically to the XPS but haven't found anything relevant to my issue. Given that its not an issue with normal debian 12 and is isolated to specifically the installed LinuxCNC ISO, I figured this was a good place to start. If this isn't the right place to ask then I appreciate the feedback and will do more searching on my own

Tommy -
For most of my testing I confirmed that secure boot was disabled. I just updated BIOS since I was still running the 2018 version so that may have reset it when I was taking the pictures. On or off, I still get the ramdisk error unfortunately.

Re: debian 12 + linuxcnc uspace install, are there no additional steps required to run linux in real time? That was the main reason I strayed away from installing via normal debian was that I thought additional kernel editing required to run RT. Not super familiar with linux and was afraid to mess it up. If its that simple I'll give that avenue a shot

www.kubuntuforums.net/forum/currently-su...oot-grub-efi-problem

With Linux you'll have to learn to extrapolate answers to suit your site.

But to tell the the truth I got a few hits using the search term I used above.

The confusing part was you didn't qualify that it was grub giving the message. You didn't state that you got this message before the kernel loaded. Hence the reason I was expecting the pictures you posted to show the message.

Debian should install on anything, I got Bookworm running on a circa 2006 Intel iMac desktop, as long as you give it the whole disk and don't intended to dual with MacOS it's pretty straight forward......oh needs nomodeset added to grub once installed .......but thats off topic.

If you can run the Debian 12.5 version, there is a script on the linuxcnc web site to install linuxcnc 2.9.2
Follow these instructions (11 & 12 do the linuxcnc install)
docs.google.com/document/d/1jeV_4VKzVmOI...diY/edit?usp=sharing