I'm reporting this, but I don't believe this is of any help. The scenario:
I was using X with moderate load when the machine locked. No, I don't
think it was because of X, since Magic-SysRq didn't work.
I had ppp and eth up, but almost no load on them (netscape doing dns
lookups, and a talk session open over the ethernet). However, I had a
'make -j zImage' going on in the background, and over 30MB of swap was
already in use.
I waited for a few minutes after the lockup, but since nothing happened, I
tried syncing and remounting r/o with SysRq, and then booting, to no
avail. Big red button time. When the machine rebooted I noticed that it
did neither sync nor remount, since there was a lot of errors on all of
the partitions.
I don't think this is reproducible, but I'll try hitting the kernel hard
again and see what happens. I just hate fsck'ing 7GB of IDE drives... :)
More info available on request. Keep up the good work.
Taneli <vahakang@cs.helsinki.fi>