[Nottingham] Deciphering a kernel Ooops

[Ted]

Hi Martin, no-one else seems to have responded, so I'll bite ...

Its a while since I had to decipher an Ooops message, but there's
a program called 'ksymoops' that can help. It needs to know where
things like the crashing kernel's 'System.map' file is to be found
(it makes reasonable guesses if you dont tell it), so you need to
have either built the kernel yourself, to generate this file, or
maybe your distribution will have included it in your installation.
I dont use any particular distribution, so I dont know what they
install with pre-built kernels. Its also needs to pointing to the
build area for any modules that were loaded into the kernel at the
time of the oops.

	See 'man 7 ksymoops'.

You mentioned having trouble with a dodgy floppy disk ... well
mounting a damaged/corrupted filesystem certainly used to be one
way to crash linux. Another way might be to load in a kernel module
that was not built alongside the currently running kernel, or built
with a different version of gcc to the one that built the kernel.
If your kernel and all its modules came with the same distribution,
they should be compatible, but if you start mixing prebuilt binaries
from different sources, this can lead to problems.

Have fun!

Ted.
-- 
Ted <ted at nowtsfree.freeserve.co.uk>
   http://www.nowtsfree.freeserve.co.uk