unable to handle kernel paging request problems on an Athlon 64
Hi everyone,
I have an Athlon 64 running kernel 2.6.6 Debian unstable, installed
according to the guide at
http://alioth.debian.org/docman/view.php/1314/21/debian-amd64-howto.html
My problem is that I keep getting the message "Unable to handle kernel
paging request" followed by a long scary looking kernel message full of
hex. I also get the occasional segfault from programs that I didn't
write, sometimes from dpkg which is disturbing. I need to get this
machine to be more reliable and robust so I can use it to do research.
Not knowing if the problem is with my kernel or the hardware I ran
memtest86 on the machine and it passed fine. I tried running cpuburn
and that ran for over an hour with no problems as well. At the
suggestion of a friend I tried the program crashme. True to its name it
crashed my machine in 2 seconds flat. I tried the program on one of the
32 bit machines in my lab and it worked fine (meaning it managed not to
crash). So can anyone tell me, is this a known problem -- should
crashme be working (i. e. not crashing) on my Athlon64? What might be
the issue causing my random unhandled kernel paging requests and
occasional segfaults?
The exact hardware setup of the machine is:
Gigabyte GA-K8NNXP motherboard, nForce 3 150 chipset
AMD Athlon 64 3200+
A Gigabyte of PC3200 RAM, 400 Mhz DDR
Maxtor 80 GB SATA 7200 6Y080M0 hard drive
Radeon 9200 SE 128
CDRW Lite-On 52x32x52
Sony 3.5in Floppy Drive
The exact process I used to setup the machine is as follows: I installed
Debian on the machine using a PATA hard drive (since the Debian beta4
installer doesn't recognize SATA drives), which I cross compiled a 64
bit kernel on using a woody chroot as the howto guide says. Then I
booted that kernel, mounted the sata drive, debootstrap'ed it as an
amd64 system using debian-amd64.alioth.debian.org as the source,
chrooted into the new debian system on the sata drive, set up the base
system, got it kernel-source-2.6.6 and built it its own kernel, made
that bootable with grub etc., took the pata drive out and booted the
installation on the sata drive. Then I started installing all my
favorite packages on it. It was when I started installing gnome related
things that dpkg first started segfaulting. It had some trouble setting
up gnome-panel-data -- some xml config file wasn't working, which I
could live with, however then it started with the kernel paging request
problems, which I can't live with. Any advice or help that can be
offered will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
-Chris Creswell
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