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SubjectRe: General protection fault in kswapd in 2.0.18
Date
Once upon a time, Linus Torvalds wrote
> Now, the corruption is interesting: the bad pointer in question is in %edx,
> and it's 0x92a67044 (which is total nonsense for a kernel pointer). However,
> the head of that doubly linked list (and probably the correct value for the
> bogus pointer) is 0x02a67000. Now, that's a interesting pattern, actually:
>
> 0x92a67044
> 0x02a67000
>
> Notice the similarity? The first and the two last nibbles have changed, but
> other than that it looks like it could be just bit corruption. That's two
> bytes with two-bit corruption, and it _might_ be due to memory problems. But
> 4 incorrect bits is really rather a lot, so it's hard to say. One thing that
> you might want to do is to just check out the memory with some good memory
> tester (no, "testing extended memory" under DOS with qemm or whatever doesn't
> count ;)

Well, it appears to have been the memory. We have two machines with
128M RAM each. Both of them started at 64M and were upgraded to 128M.
So, we took the newer 128M (that was bought to upgrade the 2 machines)
and put it in the Linux server. It has been up and running just fine
since we did that. Of course, the NT 4.0 server with the old 128M has
already crashed and had disk corruption, but oh well! ;-)

I think this is one of the greatest strengths of Linux: I have a
problem, I email the author of the kernel (the "core" anyway), and I get
an explanation of the problem. My boss (and his boss) were quite
impressed. I bet we couldn't get an answer from Bill Gates about why
the NT server is crashing! :-)

Thanks Linus!
--
Chris Adams - cadams@ro.com - System Admin - Renaissance Internet Services
"So, if anybody wants to have hardware sent to them: don't call me, but
instead write your own unix operating system. It has worked every time
for me." - Linus Torvalds, author of Linux (Unix-like) OS

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