Trying again to get this message to the alsa-devel list, as recommended by the Debian maintainer of the kernel, without being subscribed. Does alsa not have a bug report page?

Booting kernel 2.6.38 hangs at: During boot of kernel 2.6.38 (and 2.6.37) udev bugs out: Waiting for /dev to be fully populated BUG: Unable to handle kernel paging request at ffffc90013cd8000 axz_probe+ ... [snd_hda_intel] ...lots of output lost... udevadm timeout 180 sec ... udevd[390]: worker [439] failed while handling '/devices/pci0000:80/0000:80:01.0'

No sound card is recognized after the timeout of the boot as shown above. According to the /proc/asound/cards there are no sound cards

See bug Debian bug #619034 for more information. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=619034

This problem was also reported as Debian bug #613979, as kernel ticket

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30552

and sent to this mailing list in February 2011.

snd_hda_intel works properly with 2.6.32-5-amd64 (and earlier kernels).