Bug 443978

Created attachment 303626 [details]
screen shot of the message on tty1

Created attachment 303627 [details]
messages on tty1 when X crashed

after a few repetitive installs X crashed and the install was rebooted.

1) after formatting discs and package install started (GUI) I switched to tty1
2) stayed there for about 5-10 minutes
3) switched to GUI (tty7) and saw that it was waiting to be rebooted at the
final scrren
4) didn't reboot and switched to tty1 again
5) X died and the install rebooted.

saw only the mmap message but nothing for lmri.

seeing this on Xen/PV guest with 512 MB memory also 

Does this happen in other environments that are not XEN?

(In reply to comment #6)
> Does this happen in other environments that are not XEN?

Tried with bare metal but didn't see the error message. Maybe it's Xen specific.

Requesting 4.7 exception flag so we can consider this for a later Snapshot (not
a Beta blocker)

I think the error message comes from isys/smp.c:

static void *mem_chunk(size_t base, size_t len, const char *devmem)
{
        void *p;
        int fd;
        size_t mmoffset;
        void *mmp;
        
        if((fd=open(devmem, O_RDONLY))==-1)
        {
--->>>          perror(devmem);
                return NULL;
        }

The same function in isys/acpi.c has the perror line commented out. 
Given that devmem has the value of "/dev/mem" I still can't explain the message
itself. Fom the perror manual page:

First (if s is not NULL and *s is not a null byte (’\0’)) the argument string s
is printed, followed by a colon and a blank. Then  the message and a new-line.

so this should result in a message like:
/dev/mem: Bad address                              and not 
mmap /dev/mem: Bad address


I don't know where "mmap" is coming from. 

Correct me if I'm wrong.

At the top of smp.c
/*
[_Anarchy_(alan.uk.linux.org)] you should do one check
   though - if the board seems to be SMP and the CPU in /proc/cpuinfo is non
   intel dont install an SMP kernel - thats a dual pentium board with a cyrix
   or similar single cpu in it
*/

My dom0 machine is 4 (dual cores) AMD CPUs (I think) reported as 8 CPUs from
/proc/cpuinfo.

The domU is seeing a SMP board probably but the CPUs are reported as
AuthenticAMD (/proc/cpuinfo from inside anaconda).

I haven't seen this error on machine with Intel CPUs.

hitting this only with Xen and not bare metal (multi CPU AMD machine) with
latest 4.7 compose. Still not sure what's the impact. Seems to work just fine.

Per Alex, moving to 4.8 - error is confusing but doesnt seem to actually break
anything.

This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion in a Red
Hat Enterprise Linux maintenance release.  Product Management has requested
further review of this request by Red Hat Engineering, for potential
inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Update release for currently deployed
products.  This request is not yet committed for inclusion in an Update
release.

priority low and it does not have an IT.  If this issue causes the system to not be installable this bug will be considered for rhel4.8

Development Management has reviewed and declined this request.  You may appeal
this decision by reopening this request.