Re: Top 10 kernel oopses for the week ending January 12th, 2008

[Arjan van de Ven <arjan@linux.intel.com>]

Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 12, 2008 at 03:13:29PM -0800, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
>> Adrian Bunk wrote:
>>> All the other reports only contain the plain trace. Is there any way to 
>>> get more information whether the former is a pattern or not, and to
>>> get this information somehow displayed on the webpage?
>> IF the kernel prints that its tainted or whatever it'll be shown, as well
>> as the exact versions etc etc if they are there.
>> Sadly none of this information is there prior to 2.6.24-rc4.
>> ...
> 
> OK, the problem might actually not be the omission of displaying the 
> tainted information but the omission of considering any relevant 
> context.
> 
> Looking deeper:
> 
> Number #2424 is WARN_ON-after-tainted-oops.
> 
> Is your rank 1 just a symptom that the system is in a bad state after 
> running in what is your rank 8?
> 
> In this case the information when following e.g. #2827 is quite useless 
> since wherever you got this trace from all related context information 
> like e.g. whether it's like #2424 just the symptom of a previous Oops is 
> not displayed.

the tainted flags have a flag for "there was a previous oops", and if that's set,
the kerneloops.org website ignores the report. Simple as that.

> In the worst case, an entry might only contain WARN_ON traces without 
> any information where the traces came from and whether it's worth 
> looking at them or whether the system always already was in a known-bad 
> state when they occured?

again as of 2.6.24-rc4 or so, this is just no longer the case. The problem is with
older kernels which had a WARN_ON() that didn't print ANY information other than
a plain backtrace.