2.6.24.3-12.fc8 memory issue?

[Gilboa Davara]

On Mon, 2008-03-10 at 13:55 +1100, Peter McNeil wrote:
> G'day all,
> 
> did a yum update this morning which updated the kernel to  
> 2.6.24.3-12.fc8 then started my IDE and a largish program (java), as 
> soon as I hit the physical memory limit (2GB) the machine hangs 
> (freezes) sometimes the mouse freezes too. I have to power down to recover.
> 
> ...]$ uname -a
> Linux foo-foo.mcneils.net 2.6.24.3-12.fc8 #1 SMP Tue Feb 26 14:21:30 EST 
> 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
> 
> is this a known problem?
> 
> Cheers,
> Peter.
> 

Two things:
A. While it does like a kernel problem, make sure that you're not
hitting some IDE problem. (Bad sectors, etc).
Run badblocks on the swap partition to make sure you're not hitting some
disk problem.
B. If you have a second machine (laptop, windows, etc), get a NULL
serial cable and connect the two machines [1]. If the kernel indeed OOPs
out, you'll be able to post a far more informative kernel stack
dump.(You'll need to configure grub, and /etc/inittab to get it going)

- Gilboa
[1] http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO/