sporadic "freezes" on amd64 (GA K8NF)

From: Jaco Kroon (jkroon_at_cs.up.ac.za)
Date: 08/05/05

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    Date:	Fri, 05 Aug 2005 22:33:57 +0200
    To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
    
    
    

    Hello all,

    I'm absolutely stumped with this one. We are still having problems
    deciding whether this is a software problem or a hardware problem. This
    particular box (specs lower down) just freezes up sporadically when in
    Linux.

    Normally it just stops responding entirely. As in one moment it's still
    outputting and the next there is nothing. Then once, (twice actually),
    we actually got a kernel panic, I've taken a picture which can be found
    at http://www.kroon.co.za/images/kernel_panic_amd64.jpg (Apologies for
    the quality - phones aren't good at taking them). From this panic (and
    the other which I had no way of capturing at the time) it looks like a
    bug somewhere when accessing the hard drive. The one here was on
    reiserfs the other was on ext3.

    Hardware specs:

    2GB RAM
    Gigabyte K8NF
    AMD 3500+ processor
    Ge force 6200 graphics card

    We've tried at least three different distributions (Mandrake, SuSE and
    Gentoo) with both ext3 and reiserfs as file systems. Mandrake and SuSE
    was 32-bit versions and we tried both a 32 and 64 bit Gentoo.

    I've tried various kernels, from 2.6.10, 2.6.11.8, 2.6.11.11, 2.6.12,
    2.6.12.3 - all to no avail. Unfortunately I don't have the kernel
    config that was in use when we captured the trace any more. We are
    using the sata_nv module for the sata controller though.

    Now for the truly odd thing: When we down the RAM to 1GB it works fine.
     So we suspected that something might be wrong with the RAM controller
    and instead of 4 x 512MB we asked for 2 x 1GB, apparently this crashed
    as well.

    And for those who want to ask, yes, we've left it doing memtest for a
    week, we have tried different combinations of the 4 chips when going
    down to 1GB (all the combinations we tried - about 10 - worked). And
    yes, all the burn-in tests (all of the ones on the ultimate boot CD) as
    well as some burn-in tests from the suppliers (under Windows) worked
    perfectly. We also ran some benchmarking tools on Windows (Suppliers
    said if we can consistently crash Windows they'll swap out, to quote "It
    runs Windows - it performs within spec"). Needless to say - we're not
    going back to them for future purchases.

    And no, we are not using the binary nvidia module :).

    Thanks in advance for any and all suggestions.

    Jaco

    PS: A text-only version of the stack trace (minus a lot of numbers):
    Call Trace:<IRQ> {as_remove_queued_request+288}{as_move_to_dispatch+342}
        {as_next_request+941}{elv_next_request+277}
        {scsi_request_fn+89}{blk_run_queue+40}
        {scsi_end_request+252}{scsi_io_completion+484}
        {sd_rw_intr+598}{scsi_sofirq+53}
        {__do_softirq+83}{do_softirq+53}
        {irq_exit+76}{do_IRQ+71}
        {ret_from_intr+0} <EOI> {system_call+126}

    Code: 83 79 88 01 75 09 e9 a7 00 00 00 48 8b 4f 10 48 85 c9 66 90
    RIP <ffffffff{rb_erase+384} RSP <ffffffff804379d0>
    CR2: 0000.0002e8
     <0>Kernel panic - not synching: Aiee, killing interrupt handler!

    
    

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