Re: Question regarding call trace.

[Justin Piszcz <jpiszcz@lucidpixels.com>]

Thanks for the information.

On Mon, 27 Feb 2006, Jesper Juhl wrote:

> On 2/27/06, Justin Piszcz <jpiszcz@lucidpixels.com> wrote:
>> I have a trace that looks like the following, my question is, are the
>> process(es) at the top of the call trace responible for the actual crash
>> of the machine?  Are they the root cause?
>>
>
> As a general rule, functions near the top of a trace are more likely
> to be the cause of the crash than functions near the bottom, but
> that's not always the case.
> Also sometimes when dealing with race conditions some part of the
> kernel messes up and causes a different part of the kernel to crase so
> that what you see in the trace is not what actually *caused* the
> problem but merely what was affected by a problem somewhere else.
> And if there's memory corruption going on then sometimes one part of
> the kernel can scrible on random memory and cause a different and
> completely unrelated part of the kernel to blow up.
> So you cannot always trust a call trace 100%.
>
>
>> Would this point to a bad SCSI board?
>>
> I'm sorry, I can't tell you :(
>
> You might want to try enable debugging symbols and frame pointers to
> get a more readable trace.
>
> Consider these options (in the Kernel Hacking section of menuconfig) :
>  CONFIG_DEBUG_KERNEL
>  CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO
>  CONFIG_FRAME_POINTER
>  CONFIG_UNWIND_INFO
>
> There are other options in there as well that may help, read their
> description and decide for yourself if you think they will be needed -
> or maybe someone else who understands your dump better than me can
> advice on what specific options to enable.
>
> Hope this helps you.
>
> --
> Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@gmail.com>
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