Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 3577
kswapd may die after a suspend
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:50 EDT
Just suspend a portable running apmd-3.0beta5-8 under linux kernel version from 2.2.6 to 2.2.10 (maybe earlier) and if you are lucky, your kswapd may die after a while, which is random but very probable and you may see nice dumps on the screen like those on this page (see web page). I know that kswapd dies because ps tells me that kswapd is a zombi. The result of this is: a process is just blocked. If you are lucky it could be gcc that you are using, but if you are not, it could be X or mingetty, that has happened to me many times, and I did not know why. Now I suspect kswapd to be guilty. I give several kernel dump errors retrieved from my logs and a typical boot sequence of my machine. regards Alexandre
We do not ship kernel versions 2.2.6 through 2.2.10; we ship a patched version of 2.2.5. Does this problem exist on our kernel 2.2.5-22 package?
The bug is present in linux 2.2.5-22 shipped by redhat as well. I got a crash yesterday and I have updated my web page to include another trace: www.docs.uu.se/~adavid/linuxbug.html
Is there any chance you can pin this down to a version of apmd being at fault rather than the act of going through the bios? the APM calls walk through the bios, which we don't have source for. if suspend reliably doesn't work on your machine you may be forced to ask your BIOS vendor for patches. if nothing else, can you feed your oopsen through ksymoops so we have full symbol lookups and disassemblies for the kernels you were running?
The problem seems solved for kelnels >= 2.2.13 coupled with an updated BIOS.