From: "Thomas Foerster" <puckwork@madz.net>
> But suddenly the box was offline. One technical assistant from our ISP
tried to reboot
> our server (he couldn't tell me if there had been any messages on the
screen), but the
> system always hangs on
>
> Freeing unused kernel memory: xxk freed

I have a customer with the same symptom. They
have stock Mandrake 7.2 (kernel 2.2.17-21mdk)
and have installed serial-5.05 into it. The kernel
boots to the Freeing message and hangs. I
noticed ctl-alt-del still works, so I configured  in
magic sysrq (Documentation/sysrq.txt). sysrq-p
allowed me to get the eip, which checking against
the System.map I find is mod_timer(). A quick
printk showed me that the kernel isn't hung,
it's in an infinite loop, with mod_timer() being
one of the calls in the loop.

YMMV, but hopefully this method can help
you find your problem.

..Stu


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