From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; sv-SE; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041020 Description of problem: After upgrading to the current kernel, the machine has become unstable. It was previously running a custom built 2.4 kernel. With that, we did not have those problems. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.10-1.741_FC3 How reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: I have no obvious way to trigger it. It APPEARS to only happen when doing things in Mozilla, but that could of course be a coincidence. A significant part of the time used with this machine is spent with Mozilla. Additional info: I've tried to disable as much as possible. I have previously been running with several sensors modules loaded, with acpi=force, etc, and it has worked. To try to isolate the cause, I've excluded many such "extras", but I still get the crashes. To get any information at all, I've connected a serial console, and done a couple of SysRq commands at the crashes. I'll attach the two most recent of those to this bug.
Created attachment 110218 [details] Console log from one crash, starting with boot sequence Translatable system messages are in Swedish, but I think all part you may find important should be easily recognised.
Created attachment 110219 [details] A second example
Red Hat Linux release 6.1 (Cartman) Kernel 2.6.10-1.741_FC3 on an i686 There's little surprise things break. Your userspace is way too old. It could be any number of things, though my bet is on a glibc->kernel space interaction. Your only hope is to update your userspace to Fedora.
Could you explain what you mean with "userspace"? I do, for example, have glibc-2.3.4-2.fc3, which I believe is the current one. module-init-tools is 3.1-0.pre5.3, and initscripts 7.93.5-1. There are surely a few old programs around. But just running an old program should not be a way to crash the kernel, should it? Could you be a bit more precise?
what exactly did you do to get this state ? It appears that youve taken an rhl6.1 box, and installed a bunch of fc3 rpms on top ? What did you upgrade altogether ? There's just no way we can support such configurations. Unless you have a completely FC3 based userspace, bugs against the FC3 kernel are unreproducable. I'm not aware of any backtraces similar to those you posted in bugzilla, which leads me to believe this is an isolated incident.
Aha, you mean the /etc/issue message! THAT isn't true. (The background is a bit too long for a bugzilla.) I have upgraded individual packages, not everything at once. But I do believe all RELEVANT packages are from FC3. Certainly, not EVERY package is from that release. I still have an old copy of bsd-games for an extreme example. (And fedora-release is not pure either, as you noticed.) But is that really a reason to say it can't be supported? In my understanding, true userspace programs/packages like that should not be able to crash a kernel. Packages like initscripts and module-init-tools, sure! But the list should be pretty short, I would have thought. (If it actually WAS bsd-games causing a crash, it would have been a bit of a too trivial local DoS attack. But I haven't been running anything from bsd-games. :-) It may be that you haven't seen any similar backtraces. It may be that it is particular for only this machine. And you may obviously choose not to do any further investigations on this bugzilla. That is certainly up to you. But I do find the reasoning about old userspace packages a bit strange.
We support an OS release we ship as a whole unit. People who want to have a reasonable chance of their issue being investigated are expected to be running the entire operating system that we maintain, rather than mixed bits and pieces from various releases over the years. This is not an unreasonable thing. That doesn't mean there is no kernel bug. There may or may not be one, but your system isn't a supported configuration, nor is it one that is easy for someone to set up and try to reproduce anything. There isn't enough other detail to be able to hypothesize much about the issue either. Here are a few options for you to consider which may help find a solution to the problem you're experiencing: 1) Track down a specific test case that is reproduceable 100% of the time and post the details of how to reproduce it on a stock FC3 OS install. 2) Do a fresh OS install (not an upgrade) of FC3 and try to reproduce the problem. (using a different hard disk or partition if necessary. If you can isolate the problem to a specific kernel issue, or if you can provide information on how to reliably reproduce the issue in an official Fedora Core 3 OS install, update the report with those details. Random Frankenstein OS installs are not maintained nor supported however, so be wary of that. ;o)
I see.