Linux lockup

theCoder · n00b Joined: 03 Mar 2003 Posts: 39 Location: Florida, USA

I've been having this problem with my Gentoo box recently, but I can't quite figure out what's causing it. It's happened 4 times so far -- the first two times, I was using the system, but the last two it happened while I wasn't there (so I don't think it's related to anything I'm doing). The problem starts with massive hard disk usage. The mouse and keyboard stop responding, or respond really slowly. The machine still responds to pings, but no other services (like ssh). Eventually X dies. If I try to switch to a console, the framebuffer gets corrupted. I eventually just have to reboot the system. This makes it extremely difficult to do any sort of diagnostics to see what went wrong. There's nothing useful in the log file (it just stops before the lockup).

I don't know if this is a software or hardware issue (why I'm posting here). Here's what I'm running (uname -a):
Linux soma 2.4.22-gentoo-r5 #1 Sat Jan 24 16:21:42 EST 2004 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

The main partition is a 75 GB reiserFS.

I've seen something somewhat related to this on a RedHat machine at work (lots of hard drive activity eventually requiring a reboot), but that issue didn't affect the console like this does. That issue was never resolved, but it seemed to be NFS related (I am also running NFS on the Gentoo system, though to my knowledge there shouldn't have been any NFS activity when the lockups occurred).

It might be related or not, but I recently setup backuppc on this system. I've temporarily turned it off to see if that helps, but since the lockup is so sporatic (twice the first weekend in Februrary and two in the last two days) it'll be hard to tell.

Any ideas?

Mos · Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2004 12:05 am Post subject:

with this kind of problem it's hard to tell what's really going on...
Can you please exactly describe your system and its settings?

Your problem vaguely reminds me of hardware related trouble: bad memory, bad disks, too high temperatures etc...
Try to test your hardware.
Check frequently all your log files, especially the kernel log ("dmesg"), for strange messages.

Malakin · Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2004 2:54 am Post subject:

Do you have anything in cron that could be causing this like slocate? You could always try a newer kernel.

theCoder · n00b Joined: 03 Mar 2003 Posts: 39 Location: Florida, USA

Thanks for the responses!

with this kind of problem it's hard to tell what's really going on...
Can you please exactly describe your system and its settings?

Yeah, that's why I'm posting :)

It's a Gentoo system running gentoo-sources 2.4.22-r5. It's a got a Pentium 4 chip running at 2.4 GHz, 512 MB of RAM and an 80 GB HD (75 GiB ReiserFS / partition). What other details would be useful?

Your problem vaguely reminds me of hardware related trouble: bad memory, bad disks, too high temperatures etc...

I'd perfer a "oh, yeah, that's a kernel bug, upgrade to 2.4.x" or something, but a hardware problem is another possibility. The machine is almost a year old now, and hasn't had any problems so far, but that doesn't mean something isn't slowly going bad.

This brings up another question -- is there an easy way to check hardware under Linux? I can use memtest86 to test the memory, but how to test the harddrive? I've heard badblocks can do that, but that requires the drive be unmounted, which is a problem since badblocks is on that partition. I wonder if something Knoppix would work...

Do you have anything in cron that could be causing this like slocate?

I don't think so, though these events have happened near the top of the hour, so that has occured to me. Since this started happening after I installed BackupPC and the BackupPC daemon wakes up at regular intervals, it's possible that it is causing the problem somehow. I've turned it off for now, and so far, it hasn't happened again (yet)...

You could always try a newer kernel.

This may well push me to 2.6, though it would be nice to know why this was happening...

Malakin · Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2004 9:04 pm Post subject:

I highly doubt this is a hardware problem.

quark · Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2004 7:41 pm Post subject:

Which mobo you have? Does it have a NForce2 ide chip?

Mine is Soltek with NForce2 and it is causing my system to freeze during heavy writing on disk (f.ex. downloading few ~600 mb ISO images at the same time).

I've been annoyed by this for ~6 months now, but I have no idea what could be the cure... I've tried all 2.6 brand kernels and some 2.4s I think.
_________________
HP Compaq nx9420 || Intel Core2 CPU T7200 @ 2GHz | 2Gb RAM | 120Gb HD
HP Compaq nc2400 || Intel Core Duo CPU U2500 @ 1.2 GHz | 2Gb RAM | 120Gb HD