Help understanding dmesg output

[stan]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 05:58:22PM +0000, Hakan Koseoglu wrote:
> 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
> 

Very informative thanks.

Would this behavior lead you to suspect any particular peice of hardware?
Memory passed a 24 hour memtes86 ru with 0 errors, and the root disk passes
DFT. Personally the drive (or controler or cable) is my suspect. What do
you think?

-- 
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?