busy usenet server: only stable kernel is 2.6.12-mm1, rest (including 2.6.13-rc4*) barfs within a few days

busy usenet server: only stable kernel is 2.6.12-mm1, rest (including 2.6.13-rc4*) barfs within a few days

[Danny ter Haar]

I'm going nuts...
A tyan AMD64 opteron machine functioning as a usenet gateway really
pumps some traffic a day (http://newsgate.newsserver.nl)
Incoming traffic comes through a optical gig-E card (acenic)
and local traffic is fed to our spool boxes through cupper gig-E
(tigon3). Machine uses adaptec onboard scsi disks.
At first i thought i had a hardware problem since no kernel would
survive longer than 30 hours. Ofcourse i ran memtest for a couple
of days. Than i compiled 2.6.12-mm1 and this kernel surviced 18 days 
without a problem. But of course you now and then want to try 
bigger&better(tm) kernels ;-)

reboot   system boot  2.6.12-mm1       Sun Jul 31 09:47          (01:48)
reboot   system boot  2.6.13-rc4-git2  Sat Jul 30 18:29          (17:07)
reboot   system boot  2.6.12-mm1       Sat Jul 30 14:12          (04:14)
reboot   system boot  2.6.13-rc4       Fri Jul 29 14:16        (1+04:10)
reboot   system boot  2.6.13-rc3-mm3   Fri Jul 29 12:17          (01:50)
reboot   system boot  2.6.12-mm1       Thu Jul 28 00:06        (1+12:09)
reboot   system boot  2.6.13-rc3-mm2   Wed Jul 27 22:27          (01:36)
reboot   system boot  2.6.13-rc3-mm1   Wed Jul 27 11:22          (12:41)
reboot   system boot  2.6.12-mm1       Sun Jul 17 15:51        (9+19:29)

Machine dus have serial console (and remote powerboot) but no logging
posibility (portmaster1). When it crashes i think most of the times it
has something to do with IRQ.
2.6.13-rc4-git2 stopped working with the following notice:

Jul 31 03:28:18 newsgate kernel: hw tcp v4 csum failed
Jul 31 05:56:59 newsgate kernel: NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth3: transmit timed out
Jul 31 05:56:59 newsgate kernel: tg3: eth3: transmit timed out, resetting

Serial console kept spitting those messages but it gave no prompt
anymore. remote powercycle was needed to get it back.

More info/config can be found at: http://newsgate.newsserver.nl/kernel/

Any feedback/suggestions welcome.

Danny

Re: busy usenet server: only stable kernel is 2.6.12-mm1, rest (including 2.6.13-rc4*) barfs within a few days

[Alexey Dobriyan]

On Sun, Jul 31, 2005 at 09:47:18AM +0000, Danny ter Haar wrote:
> A tyan AMD64 opteron machine functioning as a usenet gateway really
> pumps some traffic a day (http://newsgate.newsserver.nl)
> Incoming traffic comes through a optical gig-E card (acenic)
> and local traffic is fed to our spool boxes through cupper gig-E
> (tigon3). Machine uses adaptec onboard scsi disks.
> At first i thought i had a hardware problem since no kernel would
> survive longer than 30 hours. Ofcourse i ran memtest for a couple
> of days. Than i compiled 2.6.12-mm1 and this kernel surviced 18 days 
> without a problem. But of course you now and then want to try 
> bigger&better(tm) kernels ;-)

I've filed a bug at kernel bugzilla, so your report won't be lost.
See http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4982

Please, register at http://bugme.osdl.org/createaccount.cgi and add yourself
to CC list.

P. S.: Andrew Morton already asked for Oops output.