From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Martin Wilck Date: Fri, 18 May 2001 19:00:31 +0000 Subject: [Linux-ia64] Software IO-TLB Kernel panic - preliminary analysis Message-Id: List-Id: References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org This problem is really hard to hunt down, as even kdb will not respond anymore after the crash happens. Also, my system logs are truncated. What I have seen, though, is that IO-TLBs are allocated very quickly immediately before the crash. By using some printk's, I saw 133 allocations of 8192-byte chunks in a row without a single deallocation immediately before the machine came down. This alone accounts for about half of the bounce buffer space, without any space that was allocated before and without any further allocations that I may have lost due to the lost lines in the log. By inspecting elements of the pci_dev structure passed to the routine, I am now 99% convinced that the Adptect 7899a controller is the "guilty" device. This fits well to the finding that the crashes always occur after (!) a file system on that card was activated a little more heavily. It seems that the problem does not occur with the "old" aic7xxx driver. On the contrary, that driver seems to deallocate every buffer immediately after allocation. Thus, for the time being I'd recommend to use the aic7xxx_old driver. But it looks like a problem that ought to be solved. Should I perhaps approach the aic7xxx maintainers? Regards, Martin -- Martin Wilck FSC EP PS DS1, Paderborn Tel. +49 5251 8 15113