Comment 2 for bug 574884

Having upgraded to maverick, seen similar results, and done a bit of playing around, I think I have a handle of what's going on here. (I think this info also relates to bug 657576).

I tried three different maverick kernels: x64, x86 (PAE), x86 (no PAE), hardware is unchanged.

In all three flavours, if left to boot naturally, the system will hang on a blank screen. In order to have a successful boot, 'nomodeset' must be added to the boot command. (I might have done this when originally installing lucid and then forgotten about it - I have no idea)

With 'nomodeset' in place, the x64 and PAE x86 kernels will then give the errors mentioned in the OP., the non-PAE kernel, however, will work fine and 3d acceleration functions correctly.

This suggests to me that it is the presence of 4GB of memory on my system that is the determining factor here, thus suggesting a 64-bit number bug in the kernel somewhere.