How to best debug kernel problems

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 04:37, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 10:17 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Does turning on kdump and installing debuginfo kernel stuff change
>> things in a way that a watchdog oops won't happen?
>
> I doubt the debuginfo package install has anything to do with it, as
> that is really only used by things like crash (and maybe perf?).
> Enabling kdump does cause some changes though, as the kernel will
> reserve a section of memory to put the kdump kernel in.  It's
> plausible that your machine is tripping on some memory issues and
> enabling kdump is forcing the kernel to not touch that memory at
> runtime.  It's something of a long shot but it's plausible.

I am going to try the memtest. The system this morning was incredibly
sluggish with a yum install taking several times longer than in the
past. A reboot of the system this morning had it oops a lot on agetty
versus working.. but it locked up solid so a power reboot was needed
so I couldn't get anything 'saved' from ram. sigh.

Will run memtest86 for the day and see if that gets anything. I had
tested the system earlier on my rawhide experience with the IBM
maintenance tools but they may miss something.


> If you haven't already, try running memtest86+ for a while and see if
> it comes back with any errors.
>
> josh
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-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard
battle." -- Ian MacLaren