Bug#38908: Apparently random system freeze
Package: General
Version: Both Slink and Potato
At apparently random times, my system will freeze such that even
Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't respond. On reboot, fsck will find at least one
deleted inode with zero dtime; occasionally, there are several. Actual
filesystem damage is an extreme rarity and no data is known to have been
lost to date with the exception of the contents of files being edited at the
time of the crash.
I initially encountered this problem on my original installation of Slink,
then upgraded to Potato in hopes of resolving it. Potato included kernel
2.2.5 at the time, but I obtained and installed a vanilla 2.2.9 kernel when
that didn't do it. I have a current Potato system as of earlier today.
Suspects for the cause have included asclock, eterm, and top, but freezes
have occurred with none of these running. I have not yet had a freeze with
no user logged in at the console, but remote use has generally been lighter
than local, so this may not be a genuine factor. Load does not appear to be
a direct factor in any case, as freezes have frequently occurred with load
averages well below 1.0.
Hardware: The system is a Cyrix 6x86-150+ with 96 MB RAM, 104 MB swap,
modem on /dev/ttyS2, LanPro PCI NE2000 clone ethernet card, SoundBlaster 16,
Adaptec AHA-1520 SCSI controller, 2 hard drives and a CD-ROM on the
motherboard's IDE controller, a CD-R on the SCSI controller, and a 2 MB S3
ViRGE video card.
--
I do not like net lags and spam
I do not like them, Sam I Am
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