According to my logs, I've now tried kernels:
2.1.70
2.1.72
2.1.80
2.1.82
These are the only 2.1 kernels I've tried so far.
_All_ of them freeze up on my machine after some random amount of time,
usually measured in hours.
With 2.1.80 and 2.1.82, I tried Magic-SysRq. It does _not_ work after
the computer has crashed.
I've not had any similar problems with 2.0.30.
[ I have an AMD K6-233 (without the bug), 64Mb RAM, an FIC PA-2011
motherboard (with one of the VIA chipsets), a 6.4G Quantum Fireball ST
disk (IDE) and a Matrox Millenium II. [A Wintel PC with no Windows and
no Intel chips <grin>] ].
Several of the lockups happened overnight, when I left the computer to
its own devices (as it were). As nothing gets logged, except the time
is more or less available from the last entry in /var/log/cron, I don't
know what it was up to when it crashed. There is some evidence that
there was always disk activity at the time.
I have a modem, and about half the crashes have happened with PPP
running. I don't run PPP for that much of my computer-using time.
While using the PC, I've found that it's always crashed during disk
activity (probably), but there doesn't have to be much of it. Just
running xpdf froze it once. (As xpdf involves a fork & exec of gs, it
could have something to do with that).
2.1.80 crashed once during the boot-time fsck after a previous crash.
2.1.82 crashed for me last night. It was doing a news download at the
time. It left the filesystem in a state that fsck would not recover
automatically.
I've not seen any console messages, but then I run X all the time.
Nothing ever makes it to the log files. (In fact, occasionally the
formatting of the log files is a bit messed up around the crash time).
So, who else has this problem?
-- Jamie