Re: unable to handle kernel paging request problems on an Athlon 64
Chris Creswell <ccc2@Lehigh.EDU> writes:
> 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
Could you install the prebuild kernel-image from alioth? Maybe you had
a broken gcc installed while you compiled the kernel or something. If
that shows no change broken hardware sounds very likey.
If dpkg keeps crashing at the same spot every time its a dpkg bug. If
it (and others) crash at random places with the same input its almost
always a hardware thing.
How long did you let memtest86 run? Let it run over night or a few
days.
MfG
Goswin
PS: when my old system broke down memtest86 was the only thing that
didn't crash within seconds. memtest might not trigger a broken MB or
CPU.
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