Bug#690814: [squeeze->wheezy regression] disk activity provokes lockups on VIA EPIA CL-6000

[Frank Lenaerts <frank.lenaerts@yahoo.com>]

--- On Wed, 10/17/12, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [squeeze->wheezy regression] disk activity provokes lockups on VIA EPIA CL-6000
To: "Frank Lenaerts" <frank.lenaerts@yahoo.com>
Cc: 690814@bugs.debian.org
Date: Wednesday, October 17, 2012, 11:19 PM

# regression
severity 690814 important
quit

Hi Frank,

Frank Lenaerts wrote:

> I had to use the power button to restart the machine. The first time
> I rebooted, the system got stuck when trying to mount one of the
> filesystems. Rebooted again and got the login prompt. Did some more
> reboots and found out that the system hangs during more or less 50%
> of the reboots. Since the disk activity LED was always on, I tried
> to provoke some disk activity e.g. by installing some packages. This
> effectively locked up the system. I only once got the system in a
> locked up state without having the disk activity LED turned on.
[...]
> Since this machine had been running Lenny just fine, and Squeeze
> also worked fine, I decided to install a 2.6 kernel.
[...]
>                          Note that it took several reboots to get
> the deb file on the system and to install it. With this kernel, the
> box runs just fine.

Thanks for reporting it.

A few suggestions for moving forward:

[...snipped...]

* if you have time to run a bisection search through the pre-compiled
   kernels at http://snapshot.debian.org/package/linux-2.6/ to find
   the first broken one, that could help narrow down things quite a bit.

Tested some of the linux images:

- 2.6.39 seems ok

- 3.0.0-1 seems ok

- 3.1.0-1 seems ok

- 3.2.0-1 does not seem to be ok:

- first boot: system hung at "Loading, please wait..."; note that the LED indicating disk activity was not burning
- second boot: ok
- third boot: ok

Had it running and used it for a few days. Then decided to give 3.2.0-3 a try again.

- 3.2.0-3 is not ok:

- first boot: crash during the boot process i.e. detected the external USB disk (which I had connected again while working with 3.2.0-1), makefile style concurrent boot, hotplug, udev... stacktrace (not sure if it was after or before the hotplug stuff; unfortunately didn't have logging turned on and keyboard was stuck)... boot process continued a bit and then hung; note that the LED was not on; since I've now seen quite some lockups without this LED being on, I think it does not necessarily have anything to do with disk activity
- seond boot: stuck in "Configuring network interfaces"; note that I've seen this more than once already

So, it looks like we'll have to investigate the differences between -1 and -3.

Question: 3.2.0-3 was the one installed during the installation. 3.2.0-1 was installed by me for testing purposes and came from 3.2.1-1. I see that the snapshot directory contains other 3.2.0-1 e.g. under 3.2.2-1. Why is it like that? I see that the 3.2.19-1 directory contains 3.2.0-2 for instance and it seems that 3.2.0-3 is not in the snapshot directory...Hope that helps, and sorry I have no better ideas,

Jonathan

[1] http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/netconsole.txt