[clug] Debugging system lockups

[David Tulloh]

Rohan Mitchell wrote:
> Hi all,
> For the last few months, i've been having occasional (maybe once every 
> day or 2) system lockups on my main system, which runs debian testing on 
> kernel 2.6.3. Numlock wont respond, nor will ctrl-alt-f1 or magic sysrq 
> key. No messages are left in /var/log/syslog or /var/log/message. It 
> seems to happen more frequently when playing sound or video, but i'm not 
> certain of this.
> What would everyone suggest to debug this problem?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Rohan
> 

This shounds like a problem I encountered between the nforce 2 
motherboards and the 2.6 kernels.  Basically there is something wrong at 
the io level, causing random lockups.  I found the problem was worse 
when I played music but particularily video due to the increased io load.

The fix is to add the kernel option nolapic to the kernel line, simply 
not selecting the option in the configuration stage doesn't seem to be 
enough.

Hope this helps,
David