Bug#512647: linux-image-2.6-686: invalid opcode: 0000 [#1] SMP

[Andrew Farr <andrew@mewan.net>]

On 30/12/2009 00:44, Moritz Muehlenhoff wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 01, 2009 at 02:08:57AM +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote:
>   
>> On Thu, 2009-01-22 at 15:12 +0000, Andrew Farr wrote: 
>>     
>>> Package: linux-image-2.6-686
>>> Version: 2.6.26+17
>>> Severity: important
>>>       
>> Sorry for the delay in answering your bug report.
>>
>>     
>>> When system is stressed for memory by running rsync 3.0.3 to a remote mail
>>> server the kernel crashes and the system becomes unresponsive.
>>>       
>> This could be related to bug 545999, which should be fixed by Debian
>> kernel version 2.6.26-20 which is scheduled to be included in the next
>> stable update.  Please could you try installing that?
>>
>> You will need to add this line to your package sources
>> (/etc/apt/sources.list):
>>
>>     deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ stable-proposed-updates main
>>
>> and then run:
>>
>>     apt-get install linux-image-2.6.26-2-686
>>     
> Andrew, did you test this?
>
> Cheers,
>         Moritz
>   
Hi Moritz,

I did install that kernel version in November and it's been completely
stable ever since.

However that's not proof that it would have fixed the original problem,
as I had already applied updates to the BIOS, RAID controller, NIC and
HDD firmware and moved completely away from using snapshots to using
Dirvish for backups and this had already made the server stable. It was
10 months until the kernel fix was mentioned after all :-)

Unfortunately, it is not practical to revert the firmware or go back to
using snapshots to test under the original conditions. However, the disk
subsystem does see some fairly serious load and
linux-image-2.6.26-2-amd64_2.6.26-20_amd64 has shown no problems at all.

Regards,
Andrew