Preston Crawford
Well, I posted around a month or so ago because I was having constant kernel panics. They died down for a while and now they're inexplicably back. My system is a self-built and configured as follows...
Pentium III flip chip on an ASUS CUV4X motherboard 768 MB of SDRAM Radeon 7000 Soundblaster Live 27GB 7200 RPM Western Digital HD 20GB 5400 RPM Western Digital HD. HP IDE CDRW (8250i) DVD Drive (not sure what brand) Sandisk CF Reader USB Gravis Gamepad Pro USB
The only thing consistent about the kernel panics is that I'm always playing OGG files off the 2nd hard drive (the 20 GB drive), which is HDB on my machine and used to store backups and OGGs. Thank goodness I do backup daily to CDRW since I crash constantly.
This sounds *very* similar to the problem I had on my machine at home
recently with SuSE 8.1. I have:
- 2 IDE disks on the same controller: /dev/hda and /dev/hdb
- CD-ROM on the other controller: /dev/hdc
- ext3 file system on all partitions
And I had immediate kernel panics when playing .avi files with mplayer
off the second hard drive (/dev/hdb).
Our kernel experts investigated this and found that it was caused by
bugs in the "barrier patch" of the kernel.
They made a kernel package with the "barrier patch" completely for me
and my machine ran very stable with that kernel.
Later they made a kernel with a fixed "barrier patch" which I am
running now. My machine runs very stable with that latest test kernel
as well.
So I sugesst that you try the update kernel from
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/update/8.1/rpm/i586/k_deflt-2.4.19-174.i586.patch.rpm
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/update/8.1/rpm/i586/k_deflt-2.4.19-174.i586.rpm
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/update/8.1/rpm/i586/k_deflt-2.4.19-174.i586_de.info
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/update/8.1/rpm/i586/k_deflt-2.4.19-174.i586_en.info
k_deflt-2.4.19-174.i586_en.info contains:
k_deflt: The standard kernel
----------------------------------------------------------------------
File: k_deflt-2.4.19-174.i586.rpm
Patchrpm: k_deflt-2.4.19-174.i586.patch.rpm
Version: 2.4.19
Size: 21380 kB
Patchsize: 13772 kB
Date: Wed 27 Nov 2002 03:25:58 AM CET
Source: k_deflt-2.4.19-174.src.rpm
Security: No
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Description: This kernel update fixes several problems that can result in crashes or
other malfunctions, in particular if using ICP Vortex RAID controllers
or multiple IDE disks. It is necessary to reboot after applying the
patch in order for the changes to become effective.
I just asked our kernel package maintainer, Hubert Mantel which kernel
this is and he said that this is the one with the "barrier patch"
completely removed. The one with the fixed "barrier patch" is not yet
on FTP.
When comparing your problem description to my experiences with my home
machine, I think it is higly likely that the above update which is
currently on the SuSE FTP server will work well for you.
--
Mike Fabian