Bug 16264

Summary:	boot failure possibly due to memory corruption
Product:	Memory Management	Reporter:	Denis Laxalde (denis)
Component:	Slab Allocator	Assignee:	Andrew Morton (akpm)
Status:	RESOLVED UNREPRODUCIBLE
Severity:	normal
Priority:	P1
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Kernel Version:	2.6.32-10	Subsystem:
Regression:	No	Bisected commit-id:
Attachments:	dmesg from boot failure another dmesg

Description Denis Laxalde 2010-06-21 15:10:23 UTC

Created attachment 26882 [details]
dmesg from boot failure

Original report in Debian BTS: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=575924

Boot sometimes fails on my laptop (see [1] for details).
Initially (with version 2.6.32-10) I could recover using SysRq key combinations and save the dmesg (attached) but now (from -13 I think, and now -15) it's no longer possible.

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=575924#5

Comment 1 Denis Laxalde 2010-06-21 15:12:20 UTC

Created attachment 26883 [details]
another dmesg

Comment 2 Andrew Morton 2010-06-22 21:04:26 UTC

Geeze, messy.  Yes, it looks like either something is randomly scribbling on memory or your hardware is unreliable.

First thing to do is to enable every kernel debugging option you can get your hands on, see if that detects anything.  Documentation/SubmitChecklist section 12 has a list, but that's probably out of date.

If that doesn't help then all I can suggest is to perform a bisection.  http://landley.net/writing/git-quick.html has some tips.

Comment 3 Denis Laxalde 2010-12-14 17:33:08 UTC

I'm afraid that the problem was solved by some upgrade (probably around 2.6.32.16) since I haven't experienced any failure since July (previously, this would happen once a week).