After upgrading to the latest kernel and lirc packages (see below for version info) I get a kernel oops during udev module loading stage of the boot routine. I wish I could post some debugging info, but I can't find the actual error message in any of the logs.

After some googling I found the following message/patch which seems to address the same or similar problem:
http://www.nabble.com/-PATCH--sync-to-2.6.27-API-change-(fixes-oops)-td19699277.html
The patch doesn't apply cleanly to the lirc 0.8.3 source, unfortunately.

It is, in either case, definitely something to do with the lirc package, because I can boot without problems if I disconnect the irda receiver. For now my fix for this is to upgrade lirc package to 0.8.4pre2 version of the source.

Please let me know if there is some additional information that I can provide about this problem.

Additional info:
* package version(s)
kernel26 2.6.27-1
lirc 0.8.3-2

Steps to reproduce:
Update kernel and lirc packages to the latest versions from testing and reboot (the problem could be hardware specific, I'm not sure).