another upgrade, another disaster

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2012-06-04 at 10:03 +0200, Andrea Musuruane wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 8:50 AM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> >> * 3rd attempt:
> >> Same as options as the 2nd attempt but this time I chose to enable
> >> only the F17 remote repositories and I disabled the "Install repo" so
> >> I presume all the packages were downloaded from the net. At about 85%
> >> of installation I got a kernel panic - this time I took care of the
> >> message "unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at
> >> 0000000000000088".
> >
> > Frankly, I wouldn't trust your hardware.
> >
> > The installer uses the same kernel as the installed system, so even if
> > you get it to install (which apparently you finally did), if you're
> > getting quasi-random kernel panics, I wouldn't be at all surprised if
> > you keep getting them on the installed system.
> >
> > That (and 'inexplicable' errors like failure to read a package on
> > known-good media) points either to bad hardware or a kernel bug specific
> > to your system in some way (as we don't have any known general kernel
> > breakage AFAIK). You'd definitely need to get better data on one of the
> > crashes (i.e. an actual log, or at least screen capture) and give it to
> > the kernel team, to look into it.
> >
> > It may be worth running memtest on the system, first, though.
> 
> Everything can be and I will run memtest as you advised.
> 
> But I didn't had any kernel problem in the past - and I've used every
> Fedora release on the same PC for about 4 years. After I could bypass
> this problem - I could install the system, including I think all the
> RPMs anaconda was trying to install without any problem. Note that I
> don't run the same kernel used by anaconda because in fedora updates
> there is available a newer one.
> 
> Anyway, in case I hit this issue again, I would be interested to know
> how to get the log of this kind of error.

Depending on how hard the fail is, it may be in /var/log/messages when
you reboot. If not, all you can do is take a picture of the screen when
the crash comes, or maybe try and use netconsole:

http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/networking/netconsole.txt

which I've got working once, but it's a bit finicky.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net