From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org ([69.77.167.62] helo=lists.gentoo.org) by finch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1KxLGb-0005S5-C3 for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Tue, 04 Nov 2008 12:44:17 +0000 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id CF155E035D; Tue, 4 Nov 2008 12:44:16 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mail.osagesoftware.com (unknown [216.144.204.42]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A8543E035D for ; Tue, 4 Nov 2008 12:44:16 +0000 (UTC) Received: from osage.osagesoftware.com (osage.osagesoftware.com [192.168.1.10]) by mail.osagesoftware.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3023D348C for ; Tue, 4 Nov 2008 07:44:14 -0500 (EST) Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2008 07:43:18 -0500 From: David Relson To: gentoo-user Subject: [gentoo-user] Kernel BUG Message-ID: <20081104074318.777c538e@osage.osagesoftware.com> Organization: Osage Software Systems, Inc. X-Mailer: Claws Mail 3.6.1 (GTK+ 2.12.11; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Archives-Salt: aea51b0a-8c98-4d81-9e5a-845564aaf012 X-Archives-Hash: 585d2ac1f1f929af9db66269cfb4a798 For about a week, my workstation has been crashing every day or so. Typically it happens late at night while BackupPC is backing up a hard drive. With "tail -F /var/log/messages" running I saw EXT3 mentioned a few days ago and started suspecting a hard drive problem. Last night it happened again. This time my "tail ..." window was opened full screen so I saw all the messages and know more. Here's part of what I wrote down (until I got tired of writing): BUG unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 0000008 IP ffffff8027ce14 free_block+0xb4/0x160 PGD 11b638067 PUD 11b631067 PMD 0 Oops 0002[1]SMP ... Call Trace 8027cac0 cache_flusharray+0x60/0xe0 8027cc46 kmem_cache_free I'm running a 2.6.25-gentoo-r7 To learn more about what's happening (and to more easily record all the kernel messages), I'm now running "tail -F /var/log/messages" from a second machine (via an SSH session). Questions: Is there a better way to capture the full BUG output??? Once I have the full BUG output, what's the next useful thing to do? Thanks! David