Kernel Panic since USN-199-1 [WORK AROUND]

[James Gray]

On Monday 17 October 2005 07:38, James Gray wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Some may have seen my Breezy upgrade success story.  The reality seems that
> the stability issue under Hoary that prompted the upgrade in the first
> place is still there.  I've narrowed down the start of the problem to the
> kernel update made in response to USN-199-1 (Ubuntu Security Notice).
>
> I'm running an AMD64 3000+ on an Asus K8VSE Deluxe with 1GB of RAM with the
> latest 2.6.10-5.?-amd64-k8 kernel.  I've reliably recreated the fault with
> the following:
> 1. Boot normally.
> 2. Load enough programs to *almost* fill ram (ie, programs + cache + buffer
> is almost 1GB) with no swap in use.
> 3. Load something else large enough to prompt the kernel to try and free
> some buffer/cache or swap out to disk.
> 4. Kernel will throw a bunch of "Unable to handle paging request at
>    0x0?????" (the address varies but seems to always be in the range that
> is only buffer/cache) into /var/log/kern.log.  The remaining details in the
> log refer to "{page_clear +7}" or other paging requests with
>    all the usual register contents etc.
> 5. At this point, what ever I loaded in #3 will stop with a "Killed"
> message. 6. Either soon after 5, or immediately, the kernel will panic and
> it's "Goodnight Irene" for the system.

I found that this is definitely a kernel bug in the 2.6.10-5 Breezy AMD64-K8 
kernel.  To work around it I have installed the 2.6.12 kernel image from the 
Breezy repo's (Universe/Multiverse?  Not sure).

If you go this route, be aware the 2.6.12 kernel is compiled with gcc-3.4 so 
if you're using the NVidia installer (ie, not the ubuntu package), make sure 
you install gcc-3.4, set the CC environment variable (CC=`which gcc-3.4 && 
export CC) BEFORE running the NVidia installer.

I'll be raising a bug against the 2.6.10-5 k8 kernel in bugzilla.ubuntu.com 
later today :)

Cheers,

James
-- 
today, n.:
 A nice place to visit, but you can't stay here for long.
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