I am not 100% sure that the GNOME CD player applet is causing this, but it seems like the most likely culprit at this point. The problem is that Linux just freezes, randomly. No console error messages, just a complete machine freeze. This only started happening last week; I've been using RedHat 6.0 for several weeks now. Here's why I believe it's the CD player applet: * It only happens when running X, and within a couple minutes of running X. * It only started happening after I took out the CD from the tray. Before, I always kept a CD in the CD-ROM tray. * When there is no CD in the tray, the applet endlessly and very frequently polls the CD-ROM. This causes lots and lots of syslog messages saying "kernel: cdrom: open failed." I think something overflows with syslogd, which causes the kernel to panic. Technically, if my theory is correct, this is really two bugs: the cdplayer applet shouldn't be such a pain in the arse that it polls the CD-ROM so frequently. Then again, this should obviously not crash the entire kernel. Bad bad bad. BTW, it looks like this doesn't happen with my custom built 2.2.9 kernel. I'm going to leave the machine on all night with no CD in the tray and I'll respond with info on whether it crashes or not.
I was able to get this to fail on a stock 6.0 install. Using tail -f /var/log/messages, I noticed that when you stop a music cd, it is reporting the following error: Jun 7 15:22:53 mrhanky kernel: hdb: packet command error: error=0x54 Jun 7 15:22:53 mrhanky kernel: ATAPI device hdb: Jun 7 15:22:53 mrhanky kernel: Error: Illegal request -- (Sense key=0x05) Jun 7 15:22:53 mrhanky kernel: Invalid field in command packet -- (asc=0x24, ascq=0x00) Jun 7 15:22:53 mrhanky kernel: The failed "Mode Select" packet command was: Jun 7 15:22:53 mrhanky kernel: "55 10 0e 00 00 00 00 00 18 00 00 00 " Jun 7 15:22:53 mrhanky kernel: Error in command packet byte 256 bit 4
I forgot to respond to this earlier... The bug doesn't happen with the 2.2.9 Linux kernel. It also doesn't happen with updated versions of the cdplayer_applet from the gnome-core package (right now I'm using 1.0.5). I am guessing the crash problem was in the kernel... However, the CD player applet still polls the CD-ROM drive incessantly. Does Linux have any way to automatically "wake up" a process when a CD-ROM drive is inserted, to avoid this silly situation where an application has to either continually poll the CD-ROM drive to see if there's a CD in there, or it has to be told explicitly by the user?
Unable to reproduce. Will keep an eye to see if problem resurfaces for user.