Issue with booting kernels after 7.0.14-6

I have a Qotom Q20332G9-S10 with an Intel C3758 processor running firmware QDNV0121.V11, dated 02/21/2024 (latest available).
It's a small mini PC with a heap of networking ports on it that I use as my home gateway (OPNsense, UnifiOS, HAOS etc.).
Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1TB NVMe.

Recently it's developed an issue where if I try to boot it up with a kernel more recent than 7.0.14-6, grub will display:
Code:
Loading Linux 7.0.14-11-pve ...
Loading initial ramdisk ...
... and just hangs.. numlock stops responding, capslock stops responding.. ctrl+alt+del gone.. have to reset or power off/on the machine to get it booting again.

Working kernel will continue on after only a brief pause on initial ramdisk line. For now, I have pinned the working kernel so it's default, using proxmox-boot-tool.

This did happen around the time of a power failure, but there have been a handful of firmware updates since then, so I'd assume if it were one kernel that got corrupted for whatever reason, a subsequent install of another shouldn't be an issue.

I do customise the kernel parameters in grub config; I've removed quiet and added:
Code:
intel_iommu=on iommu=pt
... so I can map my WAN NIC through to the OPNsense VM without it touching host network stack.

Any ideas?
 
intel_iommu=on iommu=pt
Might be worth trying to remove these first as a sanity check. If you removed quiet and still don't see an output plus your keyboard completely disconnects that would indicate the kernel dying immediately.

You mentioned this was recently, has anything changed? Any updates?
 
Yeah.. it does seem like kernel is dead on boot.. I really want to avoid disabling IOMMU, but you're right, it'd be a good test (might try it when the rest of the house isn't gaming online, and unplug the WAN link).

Besides keeping up to date with package releases from Proxmox/Debian, no updates recently.