8.04 randomly freezing requiring hard shut down, caps and scroll lock flash

[Roger E Critchlow Jr]

Okay, my 2.6.24-20 kernel panicked again this morning and nothing was in common with the other crashes -- except that it's the same machine, running on AC, using the wireless.

It appears that the only way to get a kernel panic printout is:

1 - connect a second pc via null modem cable to the serial port of the troubled machine,
2 - rewrite the grub configuration to specify the serial port as the console,
3 - start up a terminal emulator on the second pc,
4 - boot the pc with the modified grub config,
5 - and wait for the panic to happen.

Then, and only then, will you find out what the kernel prints to the console when it panics, which may be no more informative than "Oops!" or may involve a complete kernel stack trace, which you can copy from the terminal emulator window and paste into this forum.

And until someone does this, the developers have no idea what's going on.

I really don't have time to screw around with this, I've got deadlines I'm supposed to be working on.

-- rec --

[Roger E Critchlow Jr]

Okay, now running with the console output going to a minicom on a second machine, with the minicom capturing everything from now on into a file.

And RadioShack only dinged me $28.98 for the cable and null modem adapter.

-- rec --

[Roger E Critchlow Jr]

Still waiting for another panic.

I've upgraded to the 2.6.24-20.38 linux-image released today for Hardy, so I am waiting for it to panic now.

-- rec --

[Roger E Critchlow Jr]

I've updated https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/244429 with the text of the kernel panic I caught. The offending driver is the 4965AGN wireless, but it may be a compiler bug. That would explain the large number of me too's showing up.

-- rec --

[pete-wilko]

Out of curiosity, has anyone moved to the .25 kernel? Apparently a rather large part of the changes in that are in networking.

[s1102879]

This may not help at all, but this forum has been a great help to me...so I thought I would add my two cents.

Mine does the blinking lock thing as well. Here's my setup:

Dell Latitude 630
Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy)
Kernel Linux 2.6.24-19-generic
Gnome 2.22.2

Harware
Mem: 2G
Processor 0 and 1 Intel(R)Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20Ghz

Hope that helps a little.

[useResa]

Maybe I am completely wrong, but yesterday I experienced the lockup again.
What I noticed that during the last two lock ups temperatures were quire high and my fan was blowing extremely. Could it be a temperature related thing?

[leftkidney]

yep i'm having the same problem

Ubuntu 8.04
Dell - D620 1.83GHz 2GB RAM

[Roger E Critchlow Jr]

Nothing's happened with the bug report, though there are people there, I've been getting notifications about months old bugs this morning.

I thought I'd try the latest upstream version from http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Download, compat-wireless-2.6.tar.bz2 of 2008-07-30. It unpacks and builds fine, but when I do "make unload" to unload the existing drivers, I get another kernel oops. And when I reboot, I appear to get the old drivers again, at least the oops this morning still claimed to come from the same old debian build path.

I guess I'll file the new oops as a new bug. I don't understand why there's been no response from the developers to the other bug report.

-- rec --

[Roger E Critchlow Jr]

The recompiled latest version of compat-wireless generates essentially the same oops message as the most up to date ubuntu version of the drivers. I appended that information to the original bug report.

I also opened a new kernel-oops tagged bug for the oops on /sbin/rmmod iwl4965.

-- rec --