*Solution* - Still having swap kernel oops problem

[Peter McNeil]

I fixed this problem by upgrading the BIOS Flash to v1.24 from v1.18

Thanks for your help.

Peter McNeil wrote:
> G'day all,
>
> Since the introduction of the 2.6.24 kernels in fedora I have had a 
> problem where I get a Kernel Oops if I exceed physical memory. I have 
> checked swap is on and OK etc. It works fine with 2.6.23.15-137.fc8. I 
> have just tried the latest fedora kernel and the problem persists.
>
> I'm at the point where I'm considering a re-install (aghast that 
> sounds so MS) to see if that fixes the problem... but if this is a 
> kernel problem I'd like to help get it fixed. Who should I contact to 
> try and help fix this issue?
>
> Cheers,
> Peter.
>
> ---- Background Info ----
> I have an acer 5620 core 2 duo running the x86_64 version of fedora 8 
> with 2GB Ram and 2GB swap. It works fine with kernel 
> 2.6.23.15-137.fc8, but when I try any of the 2.6.24.xx-xx.fc8 kernels 
> the machine crashes when pyhsical ram fills up. Swap is not used.
>
> * I have checked swap space with badblocks, and all reports fine
> * I have tried adding a swap file and using that, but it still crashes
> * Swap is on
>
> ...$ cat /proc/swaps
> Filename                                Type            Size    
> Used    Priority
> /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol01         partition       2031608 
> 0       -1
>
> ...$ cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
> 60
>
> at the point it crashes top (via ssh) looks like this:-
>
> top - 14:13:36 up 29 min,  4 users,  load average: 1.32, 0.56, 0.38
> Tasks: 162 total,   1 running, 161 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 18.2%us,  6.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 43.0%id, 32.1%wa,  0.0%hi,  
> 0.7%si,  0.0%st
> Mem:   2061304k total,  2042936k used,    18368k free,    44764k buffers
> Swap:  2031608k total,        0k used,  2031608k free,   679356k cached
>
> if I run stress or memhog from the command line I do get a stack dump 
> I have only been able to capture a bit of that by copying it by hand:-
>
> (transcribed by hand)
> ---- quote ----
> Kernel Oops
> CR2 ffffffff00000001
>
> BUG sleeping function called from invalid context at kernel/rwsem.c:21
> in_atomic():0, irqs_disabled():1
> Pid 3920, comm: stress Tainted: P D 2.6.24.3-50.fc8 #1
>
> Call Trace:
> [<ffffffff81268b17>] down_read +0x15/0x23
> [<ffffffff8105e091>] acct_collect +0x42/0x18e
> [<ffffffff8103a632>] do_exit + 0x217/0x76b
> [<ffffffff8126b666>] do_page_fault +0x5c3/0x691
> ...
> --- end quote ---
>
>