Kernel Panic panic

[Peter King]

After upgrading to 3.1.0, one of my computers began randomly crashing, usually
after a day or two. The first time it happened I jotted down the start of the
message:

  Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason 2d on CPU0.
  Do you have a strange powersaving mode enabled?
  Dazed and confused, but trying to continue
  Process swapper...
  <snip>
  Kernel Panic -not syncing: softlockup: hung tasks
  PID:0, comm: swapper Not tainted 3.1.0-gentoo #1

The other crashes have uniformly mentioned swapper and softlockup, but not NMI.
My understanding, after googling around, is that this error message is not uncommon
and not informative -- it says that swapper (pid 0) has quit doing its job, which,
since it runs everything, doesn't say much about where the particular problem 
could lie. The other crashes also identify swapper as the hung process.

I reverted to 3.0.6, to see whether it was a kernel problem, but now the computer
has crashed again. Perhaps a problem with the 3.x kernels?

Next time I get physically near it I'll run an extended version of memtest, to see
whether this is caused by flaky memory. A few months ago this computer was too
touchy to accept either new gigabyte ethernet cards or new RAM. Perhaps the hardware
is failing.

Any ideas for further diagnostics? The log files are completely uninformative. The
filesystems are not even close to being full, and, up until recently, it seemed to
be running reliably. Thanks for any suggestions.

-- 
Peter King			 	peter.king-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
Department of Philosophy
170 St. George Street #521
The University of Toronto		    (416)-978-4951 ofc
Toronto, ON  M5R 2M8
       CANADA

http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/

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