Package: kernel-image-2.6.8-1-k7 Version: 2.6.8-2 Severity: normal Using oprofile (running opcontrol --start) makes the system unstable[1] when running a Debian kernel. I first noticed this with a 2.6.7 kernel I compiled myself (from Debian sources), so I upgraded to 2.6.8-1-k7, where I observed the same symptoms. A vanilla (kernel.org tarball) kernel built with very nearly the same config options produces none of these symptoms even with oprofile collecting data. When I'm not using oprofile, the system is rock solid stable. (memtest86+ and cpuburn don't report any errors, etc.)
Oh, I think I used gcc 3.4 to build the vanilla 2.6.8 kernel, but probably not for the 2.6.7 that had the same oprofile problems. If it's a gcc thing, that would explain it. I was going to report this as a bug against the kernel-source package, but it might well not be Debian's patches that are at fault. I am sure that the 2.6 kernels Debian distributes crash when I use oprofile. If you can't reproduce this with kernel-image-2.6.8-1-k7, I'll try to do some more narrowing down. I don't have time to use kdb/kgdb to actually find the problem myself, though :( All my testing related to this has been on an Athlon tbird running Sarge. [1] instability includes segfaults, errors, and oopses all over the place. e.g. when doing tar xjf kernel-source-2.6.8.tar.bz2, it doesn't complete because bzip2 or tar finds an error in the data they're processing. mozilla can barely start without segfaulting. -- System Information: Debian Release: 3.1 APT prefers testing APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.8-vanilla Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C
