Re: ThinkPad R51 creeping segmentation faults
On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 02:49:22PM -0700, Paul Ausbeck wrote:
> I recently replaced the hard disk in my ThinkPad R51 with a solid state
> drive and when I did so I installed Debian Wheezy LXDE updated with a 3.16
> kernel as one of the boot options. I really am pleased with how the system
> looks and acts except for a curious instability that occurs increasingly
> frequently as uptime and/or suspend/resume cycles increase.
>
This is a machine from 2004 or so so 10 years old. Is this running on the
original power supply and any of the original memory?
It may just be that the machine is nearing end of life.
> The symptom is that as time goes on more and more programs will cause a
> segmentation fault while loading. For instance, emacs commonly is the first
> program to go. Then maybe iceweasel. Just today iceweasel wouldn't load at
> all but then following another suspend/resume cycle it now loads to a point
> where it presents a safe mode dialog but then crashes if the mouse pointer
> is moved over the dialog box.
>
Top is good to see what's running at any one time.
> The machine has 2GB of dram, an Intel 2200BG wireless card, and an ATI/AMD
> mobility graphics subsystem. I mention the ram to show that it has plenty,
> the 2200BG as it's driver will occassionally start using 100% of the CPU and
> must be reset by unloading and reloading ipw2200, and the graphics subsystem
> as this machine is the only machine that I have that contains an ATI/AMD
> graphics subsystem and the first where I've used the open source radeon
> driver. Also, both the ipw2200 driver and radeon driver require binary
> firmware blobs. One other item of interest at least to me, is that I've
> configured the machine with a smaller swap file, 1GB, than the size of
> physical memory. I'm not positive, but this may be the only machine that
> I've personally configured that has a swap file smaller than physical
> memory.
>
2G and 1G swap may be a touch tight for wome programs - stuff has got bigger
over the last 10 years. I have a netbook with that sort of memory - but a dying RTC
- and it struggles with load.
> This is the eighth machine where I've installed Debian Wheezy or Jessie and
> I've not previously encountered a similar problem. I was getting to think I
> understood linux a bit but now I'm thinking I need a whole new layer of
> debug/diagnostic techniques. The reason that I'm posting about this is that
> I'm reasonably convinced that this is not a symptom of flaky hardware. I've
> checked the system memory with various tools and there is no obvious
> problem. Significantly for me, Windows XP and 7 both run on this system
> without any problems, well no vaguely similar problems. And I've been using
> this machine with Windows XP for more than 10 years. Just as an aside,
> Windows 7 is not really an option on this machine as there is no available
> Radeon Mobility graphics driver, making videos not really playable.
>
> I'm reasonably certain that the problem is not configuration related. I've
> used 3.2, 3.12 and 3.14 kernels on this box and all behave similarly to the
> 3.16 kernel. I've also used Debian Jessie and though segmentation faults are
> not reported, in the same creeping fashion the loader will begin to refuse
> to load certain programs, and though right now I can't remember the exact
> cryptic error the whole problem feels as if it is just a different
> manifestation of the segfault problem on Wheezy.
>
Memtest run for a significant period might help to flush out problems.
> I've looked around a bit on the internet for similar problems and come up
> short. In fact, this class of problem seems inherently difficult to drive to
> ground, at least with the knowledge that I currently possess. So what I hope
> is that the Debian mailing list can give me some good seeds for new
> knowledge to acquire. In particular I'd be interested in how others might
> have approached similar situations. I've tried loading emacs and iceweasel
> with gdb to get stack backtraces. With emacs, absolutely no symbols. With
> iceweasel, a few symbols and it appears that the crash happens during a
> memory free operation. I've looked at compiling a debug version of emacs but
> that isn't trivial, still in progress. The whole exercise has got me
> wondering if there are any other debug/diagnostic options to try before
> recompiling various parts of the system. One last specific question that
> sort of embarrasses me to ask, is where should segmentation fault messages
> be logged? I've grepped around and there are a few segfault messages from
> maybe a week ago in kern.log.1 and messages.1, but nothing in kern.log or
> messages.log. Perhaps these are still in a memory ring buffer somewhere? Is
> there some sort of tool for viewing user space log messages, I mean other
> than dmesg which doesn't appear to show any user space messages?
>
>
All the best
AndyC
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