Re: [ANNOUNCE] 3.0.14-rt31

["Tim Sander" <tim.sander@hbm.com>]

Hi Steven

Thanks for your reply.

> > I have just tested 3.0.14 with some local adaptions. Unfortunatly there
> > we have still two errors here:
> > Reboot ( of upstart) fails sometimes fails with the following message:
> > "reboot: Unable to execute shutdown: Bad address"
> 
> What's the bad address? Was there a kernel oops?
Well i traced it down to the error message of reboot from upstart.
(upstart-1.3/util/reboot.c:211). Presumably it was a "bad page" error out of 
the memory from the developer who reported that. Unfortunatly this error does 
not happen to often. I am not aware of a kernel oops.
(My other mail to this list: https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/12/7/657)

> > This problem can probably easily worked around by catching a failed
> > execution and retry, but i am afraid that execution fails more often in
> > other places and leads to silent functionality failures.
> > 
> > and the running wild ksoftirqd0 most probably after the kernel message:
> > "sched: RT throttling activated"
> 
> Hmm, that's not good. It means that an RT task is spinning too much.
Mh, sorry i was to terse on that. This only happens after first boot on UBIFS
update, but it shows that somehow there seems to be a corner case when
throtteling is activated. Since this seems to be the reason for ksoftirq0 
running as much cpu as it gets. I just patched out switch to rt throtteling
and i will ask the mtd guys about the work they presumably do in interrupt
context which causes this throtteling in the first place.

> > It also seems as if the system looks up after running ifconfig. But it
> > seems as if the error only shows up most of the times if i am not
> > around.
> 
> s/looks/locks/ ?
Ups yes. 

> If it happens after ifconfig, then obviously that looks to be something
> to do with either the network driver or the network stack.
Strangely top,dmesg works. We have a second avahi autoip network interface 
(eth0:avahi). Probably there is s.t. in this codepath.
 
> But there's really nothing I can do to look into this without more
> information.
It would be good if i could get some advice how to get useful information out 
of the system to pinpoint these errors (e.g. special sysrequests or s.t. like 
that). For the reboot case i will try to find the exact return value on 
failure, but for the ksoftirq0 case i currently try to work around that 
problem (by patching out the switch to throtteling) but currently i don't see 
a way to tackle the root of this behaviour.

Best regards
Tim

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