Re: crashme fault

Linus Torvalds
2007-09-17T05:29:16Z

On Sun, 16 Sep 2007, Randy Dunlap wrote:
>
> I'll test this overnight on 2.6.23-rc6-git2 since that was failing.
>
> I haven't been able to reproduce the fault on 2.6.21 after several
> hours of testing.
>
> I'll also test a microcode update to see if it helps.

Before you do the microcode update, try to see if you can bisect the place
between 2.6.21->22 that seems to start it. Even if you don't get all the
way, if you are confident enough about the "no error" case to be able to
bisect it down by doing a few reboots, it will at least cut down the set
of possible commits by roughly a factor of 2^<nr-of-bisect> events, so
even "just" a series of 4-5 bisect things might give us more of a clue.

Of course, if it's somewhat random and timing-dependent, bisection can be
hard (the "2^n" thing is very efficient, but it also means that a *single*
wrong answer will totally invalidate the result, so if something isn't
entirely reproducible, bisection often fails!)

Linus