Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Sat, 1 Feb 1997 01:11:20 -0600 (CST) | From | Solitude <> | Subject | Possible bug in 2.0.0 (And later?) |
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I am writing partially to report a possible bug, and partially because I am still in shock over what became of my ever-efficient OS...
I am running linux kernel 2.0.0 on an Acer VI15G PCI motherboard, with an Intel Pent-100 chip. I have 40 megs of physical ram and (had) 32 megs of swap. This system was first built in July of '96 and asside from various reboots it has been running non-stop since that time.
I entered the room and the first thing I heard was massive HD activity. The console had error messages streaming by, effictivley making it unusable. I telnet'ed in and learned that syslog was reporting the following error over and over:
Jan 31 15:52:38 johnf kernel: p_duplicate: trying to duplicate unused page
I looked through the source and it turns out this message is supposed to read 'swap_duplicate' Anyway, back to the story... I immediatley turned off the swap space and re-formatted and activated some new swap space on a different drive I had. The problem seemed to be fixed. I re-booted onto the rescue bootdisk and ran fsck and badblocks on all my filesystems. I ran badblocks in write mode on all my swap partitions. Neither fsck or badblocks reported any problems. I re-ran mkswap -c on all my swap partitions and re-booted. That was about 7-8 hours ago, and the system hasn't had any problems ever since.
Now: I'm no kernel hacker, but here are my own ameteur observations: There is no physical problem with the ram, motherboard, disk, controller, etc. (The controller is an AHA2940 and the ram is kingston) If this were a hardware problem then it would have surfaced much earlier then now. (Espically if it is a ram problem, as I regullarly pound the hell out of the ram with various compiles) I also have built a facsimilie of this system for several other people with the same components and no one else has had any other problems.
After reading through the memory source-code I belive that the problem I had was due to a corrupted map table in the swap area. I noticed the following syslog entry that occured just before I rebooted the system:
Jan 31 15:59:26 johnf kernel: 000be600)
The only thing about the system that I ever thought was acting kind of weird was that it seems there is about a 5 second delay betweem the SIGTERM and SIGKILL signals during a shutdown. I have tried using the -t parameter on shutdown, but no matter what the delay is very short. Otherwise, the system has always been solid as a rock, aside from this one incident.
Well, if anyone has any ideas on this, I would like to be able to have my previous confidence about the stability of Linux. If this is a problem that has been identified and corrected then I will upgrade my kernel immediatley.
- John <solitude@johnf.reshall.ksu.edu> <jsf8471@ksu.edu>
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