Kernel Panic panic

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2011 at 11:47:41AM -0500, Peter King wrote:
> 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.

It seems to be an issue that has hit various people with 3.1, 3.0, 2.6.39,
etc, back to around 2.6.37.  Something to do with an NMI watchdog rewrite
and some bad interaction with suspend/powermanagement.

Seems it is still being worked on, since no one quite has figured out what happens.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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