On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 04:05:26PM -0600, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote: > >So is there a difference between Debian and standard kernels so that I > >might not have this problem if I'd use a Debian kernel? > > Not that I know of.
Hm, maybe I'll just try one and see what happens. > Yeah, it's a problem, but it's virtually impossible to diagnose that kind of > error without instrumenting (jargon: attaching real-/run-time sensors to) the > kernel and reproducing the problem, many times. It's not something I could reproduce, it "just happens" for no apparent reason, at unregular intervals. > Causing the kernel to "dump" (similar to a process coredumping, but > the whole kernel) when some symptom (super_written get error = -5, > maybe?) manifests might give you an image that a kernel hacker could > perform a post-mortem on. Enough dumps might show a pattern. Hm. It seems that there is already an attempt made to recover from this error, so that might be a place to somehow put a hook on. The problem is that the recovery attempt doesn't work; the only thing that "works" is turning the power off and back on. > If you can find a kernel that does work, you might be able to do a > "git bisect" and identify the patch(es) that broke you -- but that > would certainly be a project. Well, that would go back about 4 years or so --- it might be in there since they switched away from libata (or whatever happened). > How much resources do you want to spend on fixing the problem? (If > you kick in enough, I'll bet the kernel hackers will kick in some, > too.) I can spend some time on it, try out different kernels, maybe get it to produce dumps ... But I don't know where I would start, other than looking at the source --- which probably won't tell me anything. But I'm wondering how many people have this problem. There are probably lots of people with SATA disks, and if most of them had this problem, it might have already heen solved. If lots of people have SATA disks but don't have this problem, I might get away with getting new disks. But maybe lots of people have it and just live with it? Or maybe there are not so many people with SATA disks? The Debian amd64 installer wasn't even able to install on SATA disks because the kernel module for the controller wasn't available, and I don't have any unusual hardware. I had to install on the IDE disk I wanted to get rid of instead --- and next time I'll get a new board, it might not have any IDE connectors and I'll be screwed when trying to install ... -- "Don't let them, daddy. Don't let the stars run down." http://adin.dyndns.org/adin/TheLastQ.htm -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
