I'd like some advice as to where to turn for help.
I find that GNOME seems to accumulate dead processes, so that my 128 Mb
RAM gets all used in 2-3 days of work, and I start using swap. When it
gets to about 50% swap, I figure its time to reboot. This time was par-
ticularly nasty. I've had other such experiences, but each one differs,
and I'
ve been fored to do a few reinstalls of RH6.0 because of it.
As is often the case, when I tried to shut down X, it only partially
shutdown, and I loose both keyboard and mouse. No choice but to RESET,
and this naturally causes problems.
Today when I rebooted this way, I first arrived at LIL-. So I rebooted,
and this time LILO ran ok. But in mid-boot, I got what seems to be a mem-
roy dump. It has lines like
Process Swapper (pid: 0, process nr.:0...
Call Trace: ...
Aiee, killing interrup handler
Kernal Panic: Attempted to kill idle task
In swapper task - not syncing
etc.
Then I had to run fsck -A -V, and it was messy.
On the next reboot, the boot process hung at
Starting NFS statd
Starting FGS quotas [OK]
I don't use NFS.
On next boot, I got another memory dump, but different from the first,
with lines like:
Process rc.sysinit (pid: 10, process nr: 8, stacklpage= e7caf000)
Unable to handle Kernel NULL pointer dereference at address 0000011
current -> tss.cr3 =07e60000, %cr3 = 07e6000
*pdc = 00000000
Process init (pid: 1, process nr: 1
etc.
Next reboot ran well, and desktop came up quickly, unlike before.
Whom can I turn to for help in identifying the problem. Perhaps I ran out
of stack space, but the RAM applet said I was only using 50% of its 64 Mb.
Who knows anything about ghost processes in GNOME? Who, if anyone, has
interest in the dump details? Interpreting the dumps is beyond me, but
surely someone has expertise and is willing to offer advice.
Another thing I worry about is some flakey RAM. Once in a while it seems
to cut back. Could some bad RAM be causing some of these problems?
Haines Brown
