server freezes from time to time (PE1750 RHEL 4) - Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer

[Ray Van Dolson]

On Wed, May 10, 2006 at 12:04:19PM +0200, Götz Reinicke wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> in the last week and today again our PE1750 with raid 1, dual CPU
> freezes. The OS is RHEL 4 with kernel-smp-2.6.9-34.EL. We used
> kernel-smp-2.6.9-22.0.1.EL before and AFAIK there where no freezes.
> 
> A couple of days before the freezing starts, we changed one defect
> harddisk and rebuildet the raid with a new harddisk from dell. Other
> hardware/software wasn't changed
> 
> Any ideas?
> 
> May 10 06:30:09 mail kernel: CPU:    3
> May 10 06:30:09 mail kernel: EIP:    0060:[<c0185420>]    Tainted: P
>   VLI

What module are you using that's tainting your kernel?

I found that using a third-party MPPE module (now included with the kernel
proper) would cause kernel panics like this when in SMP mode.  Running in
single processor mode fixed the problem.  Fortunately we didn't really need
that second CPU anyways.

Ray