Re: PROBLEM: Kernel 2.6.10 crashing repeatedly and hard

Herbert Poetzl
2004-12-31T04:16:33Z

On Thu, Dec 30, 2004 at 02:23:01PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, 30 Dec 2004, Georg C. F. Greve wrote:
> >
> > lt> Any chance that you can get a full oops, with register info?
> > lt> Right now your errors only have the call trace, not the registers
> > lt> or the EIP itself..
> >
> > Yes, for the first two times, the top of the crash report scrolled off
> > the screen and I don't have a serial console handy. The third crash
> > contained the
> >
> > EFLAGS: 00010002 (2.6.10)
> > EIP is at free_block+0x45/0xd0
> > eax: 46484849 ebx: df2b1000 ecx: df2b1050 edx: df2ab000
> > esi: c183cd80 edi: 00000001 ebp: 00000018 esp: c188fef8
> > ds: 007b es: 007b ss: 0068
> > Process events/0 (pid: 6, threadinfo:c188e000 task=c185ca20)
> > Stack: c183cdb8 c1858810 c1858800 00000018 c183cd80 c0141724 c183cd80 c1858810
> > 00000018 c183ccb8 c183cd80 00000002 c183cce0 c01417c6 c183cd80 c1858800
> > 00000000 c183ccb8 c183ce10 00000003 c170fc20 c183b000 c170fc24 00000000
> >
> > header, which I think may contain what you were looking for.
>
> Ok. This is apparently a slab cache corruption issue.
>
> Can you compile with SLAB_DEBUG and DEBUG_PAGEALLOC turned on, since that
> may well catch something in the act (or it may make the machine so
> unusably slow that it's not funny - who knows..)
>
> > Meanwhile, because of the trouble, I gave Alans patch-2.6.10-ac1 a try
> > and again put ext3 on dm-crypt on raid5, and: No crash so far despite
> > moving and removing ~100 gigabytes a couple of times on to/from the
> > partition.
>
> Goodie. Maybe Alan already knows what it's about. Alan? Any slab
> corruption or wild pointers that you are aware of? However:
>
> > I did however get occasional
> >
> > EXT3-fs error (device dm-0): ext3_readdir: bad entry in directory #37306376: directory entry across blocks - offset=0, inode=3350155169, rec_len=11148, name_len=1
>
> I suspect that it's more of the slab corruption thing, and Alan's patch
> ended up moving something around subtly enough that you don't get the
> crash, but instead get corrupted buffer heads or similar.. Your BTTV
> issues are interesting, though.

maybe this can provide more information (let me know if
you need an ASCII version, I'll transcribe it by hand then)

http://vserver.13thfloor.at/Experimental/OOPS/kernel-first-oops.jpg

(the kernel source tree might be still available)

best,
Herbert

> Linus
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