Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 187998
CPU soft lockup at random times
Last modified: 2008-08-02 19:40:33 EDT
Description of problem: I have a Dell Inspiron 8500 (European) that worked always perfectly under FC4 but freezes completly now under FC5. It doesn't freeze on a specific issue but from time to time. It can run fine for 10 minutes or 4 hour and then at a certain point boom CPU lockup. What seems to be consistent is that it does freeze every single time I run updatedb, even from a text console without logging in the GDM. Attached is the output of the bug on the main terminal, copied by hand since I couldn't find any trace in the logfiles. dmesg is fine, although I do have errors from nautilus (but they seem not related to this lockup). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Actual results: Expected results: Additional info:
Created attachment 127336 [details] Screen Dump of Bug
After further investigation the problem seems to be strictly related to file operations. It does crash every single time you run updatedb (and before the random crashes where due to cron scheduled updatedb), but it crashes also when you use the new desktop search or also when in bash you type like p and the <tab> (process crashing: bash) beacuse it has to go through a big index of files.
This looks like a kernel bug though. The component filesystem is only about bugs in that respective package which contains a raw directory structure for a standard system. Reassigning to proper component. Read ya, Phil
A new kernel update has been released (Version: 2.6.18-1.2200.fc5) based upon a new upstream kernel release. Please retest against this new kernel, as a large number of patches go into each upstream release, possibly including changes that may address this problem. This bug has been placed in NEEDINFO state. Due to the large volume of inactive bugs in bugzilla, if this bug is still in this state in two weeks time, it will be closed. Should this bug still be relevant after this period, the reporter can reopen the bug at any time. Any other users on the Cc: list of this bug can request that the bug be reopened by adding a comment to the bug. In the last few updates, some users upgrading from FC4->FC5 have reported that installing a kernel update has left their systems unbootable. If you have been affected by this problem please check you only have one version of device-mapper & lvm2 installed. See bug 207474 for further details. If this bug is a problem preventing you from installing the release this version is filed against, please see bug 169613. If this bug has been fixed, but you are now experiencing a different problem, please file a separate bug for the new problem. Thank you.
I've just seen something similar on kernel 2.6.18-1.2239.fc5. I was running a rsync daemon, and transferring a large number of files to a client on a different machine. The output at the client was the following: mij-6 kernel: Oops: 0002 [#1] mij-6 kernel: CPU: 0 mij-6 kernel: EIP is at drop_buffers+0x5c/0x8f mij-6 kernel: eax: cd31b274 ebx: d6a71170 ecx: 00000000 edx: d6a71198 mij-6 kernel: esi: c1297580 edi: d6a71170 ebp: d6a71170 esp: dbf61df8 mij-6 kernel: ds: 007b es: 007b ss: 0068 mij-6 kernel: Process kswapd0 (pid: 91, ti=dbf61000 task=dbf00750 task.ti=dbf61000) mij-6 kernel: Stack: dbf61e10 da7c6c48 c1297580 00000000 c0654d40 c045bfb8 00000000 dc8d97e0 mij-6 kernel: 000000d0 00000001 c045c01d c1297580 da7c6bf0 c04473b0 dbf61f14 00000046 mij-6 kernel: dbf61f78 00000020 00000000 00000000 00000020 00000002 00000001 00000000 mij-6 kernel: Call Trace: mij-6 kernel: [<c045bfb8>] try_to_free_buffers+0x4d/0x7e mij-6 kernel: [<c045c01d>] try_to_release_page+0x34/0x46 mij-6 kernel: [<c04473b0>] shrink_inactive_list+0x454/0x697 However, on the console screen I saw the following (copied by hand) [<c0444546>] __alloc_pages+0x190/0x292 [<c0331362>] generic_file_buffered_write+0x19e/0x5f1 ... [<dc8d5fbc>] ext3_file_write+0x24/0x90 [ext3] ... BUG: soft lockup detected on CPU#0! ... The system I'm running on is a VIA EPIA EN12000E motherboard with a VIA Eden CPU and a VIA VT8237R chipset. I've only seen this once.
Michael, your soft lockup is the symptom of a bigger problem (The oops). Can you open a seperate bug, and see if this made it to the logs, as there's some parts of the kernel messages that seem to be missing.
(this is a mass-close to kernel bugs in NEEDINFO state) As indicated previously there has been no update on the progress of this bug therefore I am closing it as INSUFFICIENT_DATA. Please re-open if the issue still occurs for you and I will try to assist in its resolution. Thank you for taking the time to report the initial bug. If you believe that this bug was closed in error, please feel free to reopen this bug.