Re: Too much memory causes crash when reading/writing to disk

[Jeff Lessem]

In your message of: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 00:00:54 +1000, you write:
>> I made the patch against
>> 2.4.6, because 2.4.7-pre6 doesn't boot at all (I guess I should send
>> another message about that problem).
>
>If it's locking up just after printing out the `NET3' banner,
>don't bother - known problem with softirqs.  It'll be fixed
>in the next kernel.

Yes, that is the problem.  I'll wait for a future release.

>> >Also (but separately) try enabling the NMI watchdog with
>> >the `nmi_watchdog=1' kernel boot parameter.
>> 
>> This worked, and I recreated the crash:
>
>Wouldn't have a clue.  It isn't spinning on a lock.
>It almost looks as if the timer interrupt isn't getting
>cleared, and the CPU is never leaving the interrupt.  But
>that would cause the timer interrupt count to increase like
>crazy and the NMI would never have kicked in.  Nice one.
>
>For interest's sake, could you please try booting with the
>`noapic' option, and also send another NMI watchdog trace?

I tried that, but the Symbios SCSI controller freaks out with noapic.
I can be more detailed if that would be useful.  I can also try a
non-smp kernel and run the machine with 1 processor and 8GB, if you
think that would be useful in solving the problem.

I appreciate your help in this, as yes, the problem is indeed a nice
one...

--
Jeff Lessem.