Re: system instablity

[Ed Cogburn <ecogburn@greene.xtn.net>]

john@dhh.gt.org wrote:
> 
> Ed C. writes:
> > I first got the same kind of 'General failure: 00000' message from
> > apt/dpkg then I got the kernel message that began with 'Aiyee' or
> > something like that.  It was the first time I've seen a hard kernel crash
> > outside of the X win system.
> 
> An X server can crash the kernel because it has privileged i/o and memory
> access.  Programs such as apt and dpkg cannot.  What you got can only be
> either a kernel bug or a hardware problem.  Since apt and dpkg do nothing
> at all out of the ordinary from the point of view of the kernel, it is
> unlikely that they would tickle a kernel bug that would not also be tickled
> by many other programs.  Thus we are left with hardware.  How's your
> cooling?
> --
> John Hasler
> john@dhh.gt.org (John Hasler)
> Dancing Horse Hill
> Elmwood, WI


	Yes, I know about X causing problems with the kernel that wouldn't
occur with a program that didn't directly access the video hardware.  I
was emphasizing the fact that I've never seen a console program crash
the kernel.

	My hardware has been the same since Debian 1.3.1.  I never had this
kind of problem before Debian 2.0, and I don't see anything similar in
Win95.  Keep in mind what I said about using dpkg manually to
sucessfully install the same package(s) that crashed dselect/apt.  Also,
if it were a hardware problem, I'd be seeing other Linux software
(unrelated to dselect/apt/dpkg) having similar and frequent problems,
but that is not what is happening on my system.  In fact, IIRC, I've
never seen the 'General protection/failure' message from any other
software.

	I realize this is a rare problem, because few if anyone is seeing it,
but its clear to me that its not a hardware problem, even though I
understand that you don't believe me, and you are not the only one to
tell me its not Debian software thats causing the problem.

	It may be related to filesystem problems I had earlier, yet fsck says
that now my filesystem is fine.  I even ran a grep on all of my
filesystem files (except /proc & /dev) hoping to trigger an invalid
and/or broken file with errors, but that didn't find anything wrong
either.

	Next time I upgrade, I'll do it manually with dpkg; maybe the problem
is with dselect/apt.

	I also promise that I'll send a failure report to this list if I can
just find one of these errors to be repeatable.  So far they are all
transient.


-- 
Ed C.