I just had 2.2.10 crash on me in a way reminiscent of a memory leak
and/or disk problem.
I was using X. Suddenly the system started paging a lot and pointer
movement got very jerky (a few seconds between movements).
On this system that's very unusual: a PII with 128Mb RAM, 100Mb swap and
a fast, quiet disk. Paging is usually not noticable.
Some 10 seconds later the X display disappeared, leaving the following
message on every line of tty1:
ll_rw_block: device 03:05: only 512-char blocks implemented (4096)
The console didn't respond to Control-C.
I was able too switch to another vt and type in a name at login: prompt,
but no password prompt appeared. Same on another vt.
So I shut the system down with Alt-SysRQ S U B (sync, unmount, boot).
That worked fine. Sync and unmount made the disk light flash briefly as
normal.
After booting there was nothing interesting in the logs (and I log all
kernel messages -- kern.* in syslog.conf).
I forced an fsck and there was nothing wrong on the disk.
So what's up?
-------------
A memory leak? I don't know, I didn't look at `free' output. A variant
on the disk problem? Other people have mentioned "write beyond end of
device" appearing in their logs; perhaps this is related.
I've had earler 2.2.x go down on my in a similar fashion on different
hardware -- not with the messages, but suddenly a lot of disk activitiy
followed by X crashing.
Software & hardware
-------------------
Linux 2.2.10 on Red Hat 6.0, all the latest upgrades of packages I use.
All fses are ext2 with 1k blocksize (including 03:05),
except an ntfs mounted read only on 03:01.
X running some remote apps, but nothing that looked too image intensive.
(but who knows -- the remote Maxplus2 on Unix is a windows app wrapped
in some Unix windows-emulation lookalike kludge).
A netscape running off-screen.
Nothing much happening in the background.
A happy pitter-patter of tiny fresh raindrops from the skies of...
-- Jamie
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