Help understanding dmesg output

[Hakan Koseoglu]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 5:23 PM, stan <stanb at panix.com> wrote:
> I have a syn U40 machine that we use for our backup master machine. It hs
> been locking up on a regular bassis. I am fairly certain it is a hardware
> issue, but Sun support does not seem to be able to diagnose the problem.

You have a bad tape media.
> [190378.687972] st0: Failed to read 262144 byte block with 32768 byte transfer.

Quite some time later as the little men running around the processes
measure time, this process died not very nicely:

> [284957.331249] Pid: 21069, comm: gkrellm Tainted: P        W  2.6.28-16-generic #55-Ubuntu
> [284957.331251] RIP: 0010:[<ffffffff802b74e5>]  [<ffffffff802b74e5>] free_hot_cold_page+0x85/0x270

and you have a tainted kernel, meaning you are using some third party
modules, I'd hazard a guess, nvidia. Rest are register values if you
want to debug further.

And this is what it was doing just before it crashed, unmapping some memory.
> [284957.331291] Call Trace:
> [284957.331293]  [<ffffffff802b770a>] __pagevec_free+0x3a/0x50
> [284957.331295]  [<ffffffff802ba9e4>] release_pages+0x1c4/0x210
> [284957.331299]  [<ffffffff802c4b20>] ? unmap_vmas+0x180/0x2c0
> [284957.331303]  [<ffffffff802d2c3e>] free_pages_and_swap_cache+0x7e/0xa0
> [284957.331306]  [<ffffffff802c9720>] unmap_region+0x130/0x150
> [284957.331309]  [<ffffffff802cb102>] do_munmap+0x302/0x3b0
> [284957.331312]  [<ffffffff802cb200>] sys_munmap+0x50/0x80
> [284957.331315]  [<ffffffff8021253a>] system_call_fastpath+0x16/0x1b


-- 
Hakan (m1fcj) - http://www.hititgunesi.org