Hi, Yes I have seen this occasionaly. I am using HHL20 (2.4.2) on an Embedded Planet CLLF board (a board that MV supports). The oops always mentions kswapd. I do not have the experience that it either works or always crashes. I had the impression that this only happens (lets say once every 20 boots) when I use NFS as root-fs, not when I use an intrd from flash. The problems looks like timing-related to me, a race-condition...
Fred -----Original Message----- From: Steve Rossi [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: maandag 15 april 2002 14:35 To: Embedded Linux PPC List Subject: strange crashes Hi All, Wondering if anyone has seen this ... I've been periodically fighting some pseudo-random crashes. These occur always during kernel boot, and occur consistenly (i.e. at the same address) for a given kernel build. The crash usually occurs right after kswapd starts or somewhere in the following inittasks where I get a kernel oops with access to bad area. I say these are pseudo random, because they depend on how the kernel is built. A given build will either work always or work never. Some of the things that I've observed that causes it to not work are things like adding config options that make the kernel bigger, compiling with debugging symbols - and (don't laugh) changing the path to the kernel. Thats right, an identical kernel placed at two different paths, compiled clean from both locations - one will boot and run fine, the other will crash during boot. I'm using the MontaVista tools from the 2.0 Journeyman and the 2.4.16 kernel with some modifications on custom hardware. I'm certain its not a hardware problem, because once I get a kernel that boots, it runs solidly. In my latest encounter with this problem, it happened when I added one file to my initial ramdisk - thereby increasing its size by a few K - absolutely nothing else changed. Before that the same exact kernel booted and ran solidly, now it does not. I'm fairly certain that the problem is not just size related, though that seems to play some role. I suspect some kind of a compiler or linker problem but I wanted to ask around before spending too much time digging into it. Any similar experiences or ideas of what might be going on? Thanks, Steve -- ------------------------------------------------------- Steven K. Rossi srossi at labs.mot.com Senior Staff Engineer Multimedia Communications Research Laboratory Motorola Labs ------------------------------------------------------- ** Sent via the linuxppc-embedded mail list. See http://lists.linuxppc.org/
