I was able to easily reproduce it by running 'make check'. The first test case (gcore) reliably fails with either a system hang or an MCA.
Bisect shows that it was introduced by the following commit: 62eede62dafb4a6633eae7ffbeb34c60dba5e7b1 is the first bad commit commit 62eede62dafb4a6633eae7ffbeb34c60dba5e7b1 Author: Hugh Dickins <hugh.dick...@tiscali.co.uk> Date: Mon Sep 21 17:03:34 2009 -0700 mm: ZERO_PAGE without PTE_SPECIAL Reinstate anonymous use of ZERO_PAGE to all architectures, not just to those which __HAVE_ARCH_PTE_SPECIAL: as suggested by Nick Piggin. Contrary to how I'd imagined it, there's nothing ugly about this, just a zero_pfn test built into one or another block of vm_normal_page(). But the MIPS ZERO_PAGE-of-many-colours case demands is_zero_pfn() and my_zero_pfn() inlines. Reinstate its mremap move_pte() shuffling of ZERO_PAGEs we did from 2.6.17 to 2.6.19? Not unless someone shouts for that: it would have to take vm_flags to weed out some cases. Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh.dick...@tiscali.co.uk> Cc: Rik van Riel <r...@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hir...@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motoh...@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Nick Piggin <npig...@suse.de> Cc: Mel Gorman <m...@csn.ul.ie> Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan....@gmail.com> Cc: Ralf Baechle <r...@linux-mips.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <a...@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torva...@linux-foundation.org> I also checked SLES11 SP1, but this issue was not reproducible. I went through the config differences & found that the relevant difference is PAGE_SIZE. For whatever reason, 64KB pages (which SLES uses) masks the issue, while 16KB (Debian) does not. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-kernel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100720172236.ge26...@ldl.fc.hp.com