Bug#652119: Bad pagetable 000f

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hey Matthew,

Matthew Wakeling wrote:

> Running the par2 program causes a bad pagetable fault which has
> killed the process and killed the machine on two different
> occasions. The machine is completely stable running other programs.
>
> The problem occurs when running par2 to generate 13.5GB of recovery
> data for 50GB of data in eleven equal size files, a task that should
> take about 10 hours on my system. The task seems to cause a crash
> after about two hours.

Can you reproduce this on demand?

If so, some questions:

 - was this a regression?  (I.e., do you know of any older kernel
   versions without this bug?)

 - can you reproduce it with a recent kernel from sid or experimental?
   (The only packages from outside squeeze you should need in order to
   test this aside from the kernel image itself are linux-base and
   initramfs-tools.)

If this is reproducible with newish kernels, we can get help from
upstream.  If it isn't, we can try to find what change fixed it and
try applying the same fix to squeeze.

Thanks and hope that helps,
Jonathan