@sirhcjw we have had another recent post relating to ACPI and I quoted your original findings here in that forum thread and articulated how I thought it might relate. When I saw that you had effectively reverted your settings to full ACPI on I thought I’d wait and see how you got on. Drawing the two together now, though they are only tangentially related, I suggest you turn off “ACPI 2.0 support” in bios but leave on “ACPI APIC suport” as that combination found by @KarstenV from your original findings allowed all their CPU cores to be enabled whilst they were still able to install. But of course you may not have those options in your BIOS. Their situation was a little less instability and a little more “wont install” specifically around the grub area. I detail there what I think was happening but of course that may all be wrong. But their finding was that disabling just ACPI 2.0 Support allowed them to install past the final grub which previous to this BIOS adjustment was failing with unknown error. I surmised this to be similar to your mostly hidden timeout issue. Give that post a read and see if it helps, thanks for keeping us all posted as these kinds of issues are a real pain and if we could work out a blanket guide that would be great.
Tweaking just BIOS settings is also preferred as it’s less fiddly than kernel boot options but we may still need them in some circumstances of course.
Nice idea on the hardware database by the way, I’m just not quite sure how we would establish if the reports were from “known good” hardware as many settings event on the same board can affect stability. There is definately something to it though. Or maybe we should just reference CentOS certified hardware as that is essentially what Rockstor is linux wise at least.