[From nobody Mon Oct  4 14:59:04 2004
Message-ID: <416094BF.3030200@jonmasters.org>
Date: Mon, 04 Oct 2004 01:09:35 +0100
From: Jon Masters <jonathan@jonmasters.org>
Organization: World Organi[sz]ation Of Broken Dreams
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.8 (X11/20040918)
X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: nottingham@mailman.lug.org.uk
Subject: Re: [Nottingham] Deciphering a kernel Ooops
References: <414AF140.1000100@ml1.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <414AF140.1000100@ml1.co.uk>
X-Enigmail-Version: 0.86.1.0
X-Enigmail-Supports: pgp-inline, pgp-mime
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Martin wrote:

> Just had this system slowly die just now. Checking the logs, the only 
> anomalies are a few fd0 errors for a dodgy floppy disk from yesterday, 
> and a kernel Ooops from earlier this morning.

It oopsed in as a result of a call to init_dev within tty_open and I'm 
trying to figure out what could have done this, but there have been some 
bugs in the tty driver I believe recently. What we need to do next is 
the following...

     1). Recompile the offending Mandrake kernel on said box with 
debugging symbols and send me a copy of tty_io.o generated - that way I 
don't have to guess what the assembly output by ksymoops relates to in 
the original file and can find the exact line number of the fault.

     2). Tell me whether you are using a serial console or have anything 
else weird about the tty that you are on here (serial console?).

> So who can give a more human translation of the Ooops message?

I'm working on it. It's unlikely to be your disk dying here - the vfs 
checking was just the kernel confirming that you're allowed to open the 
tty that the current process is on, but I'm not sure exactly where it's 
getting a NULL pointer. I'm hoping you're on a serial console.

Jon.

]