From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756960AbXHSWwi (ORCPT ); Sun, 19 Aug 2007 18:52:38 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751318AbXHSWwb (ORCPT ); Sun, 19 Aug 2007 18:52:31 -0400 Received: from ns1.suse.de ([195.135.220.2]:51741 "EHLO mx1.suse.de" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751365AbXHSWwa (ORCPT ); Sun, 19 Aug 2007 18:52:30 -0400 To: Hamish Moffatt Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: general protection fault with powernow-k8 frequency scaling on x86-64 References: <20070819034558.GB9431@cloud.net.au> From: Andi Kleen Date: 20 Aug 2007 01:46:27 +0200 In-Reply-To: <20070819034558.GB9431@cloud.net.au> Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.3 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hamish Moffatt writes: > I'm running 2.6.22.1 (Debian's package) although this started happening > at first with about 2.6.17. If you can reproduce it you could bisect it. But it's unlikely that it is a software problem. However it might just be that powernow wasn't used in the old kernel and some change made it work. Also newer kernels tend to change frequencies more often especially with ondemand; that might have also triggered it. > > Here's an example fault; a few more occur a few minutes after that, then > the whole system locks up soon after. The complete kernel log is below. > > Any ideas? It sounds like some kind of hardware issue. The Voltage Regulation Module on the motherboard could have problems with the power supply to the CPU and that can then cause all kinds of weird effects. On K7 such problems were fairly common; on K8 less so because powernow is more widdespread but can happen occasionally. It might also be that your hardware degenerated (e.g cheap boards often have not very long lived components). You could double check that by running the 2.6.17 kernel again (making sure it does powernow) Exchanging the motherboard could potentially safe a lot of trouble. Or not run powernow anymore. -Andi