Re: Oops in find_busiest_group(): 2.6.8-rc1-mm1

[Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>]

Paul Jackson wrote:

>I just hit what might be the same oops.
>
>I had not upgraded my working kernel for a month, and just now, when I
>upgraded to 2.6.8-rc2-mm1, running sn2_defconfig on a small SN2 system,
>it fails to boot everytime, ending with an Oops that starts out with:
>
>======================================================
>Freeing unused kernel memory: 320kB freed
>Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference (address 0000000000000008)
>swapper[0]: Oops 8813272891392 [1]
>Modules linked in:
>
>Pid: 0, CPU 0, comm:              swapper
>psr : 0000101008022018 ifs : 8000000000000e20 ip  : [<a0000001000bd710>]    Not tainted
>ip is at find_busiest_group+0xb0/0x640
>======================================================
>
>I added a conditional printk_ratelimit'ed print at the top of
>find_busiest_group() whenever group is NULL, just before the first
>dereference of group in the line:
>
>	local_group = cpu_isset(this_cpu, group->cpumask);
>
>That print fires about 20,480 times each 5 second suppression window.
>
>But it boots, if I also add code to break out of the "do { ... } while
>(group != sd->groups)" loop, whenever group goes NULL.
>
>

OK, I still can't work out why this is happening. Can you try with
2.6.8-rc2-mm1? Does it happen continually after the system has booted?
If it happens in 2.6.8-rc2-mm1, comment out the call to cpu_attach_domain
in kernel/sched.c (so you'll only be using the dummy boot-up domain).
Does that fix it?