Kernel crashing problems on oldworld

[Chris Tillman]

I have a PowerBase 180 oldworld powerpc with Debian woody
(2.2.19-pmac). I started having a crashing problem about 4 weeks ago,
the easiest way to repeat it was to use nano (1.0.5/1.0.6) to edit a
document, and select the Search function or the save-file function. In
either case, the computer would freeze as it was attempting to update
the help keys across the bottom of the screen. This never occurred in
nano-tiny, which is a reduced-library version.

There is no kernel message with this crash, it simply freezes the
machine. I tried strace, its log gets cut off shortly after the
keystroke which causes the crash, so it's not much help.

I traced the execution of the code from nano into the ncurses library,
and determined that it was crashing right after a call to
_nc_flush(). Here is an example backtrace just prior to a crash:

in doupdate() at ../ncurses/tty/tty_update.c:787   _nc_flush();
called by wrefresh() at ../ncurses/base/lib-refresh.c:60
called by bottombars() at ../nano/winio.c:562
called by display_main_list() at ../nano/winio.c:1152
called by search_abort() at search.c:298

The maintainer says that _nc_flush() simply calls fflush. Of course,
that function is called many times in this and other programs -- it is
only these special circumstances in which it causes a crash.

This problem doesn't occur on my newworld powerpc, but it is
reliably repeatable on my oldworld. I also got serveral crashes in
dselect which uses the same ncurses library.

I verified that the same thing happens if I install on a different
partition, even a different disk. It did *not* repeat on another
oldworld computer (PowerCenter 150) with the same woody installation
(it's on an external SCSI disk, I just moved the disk to the new
machine) - so I concluded it was some conflict with my ATY Mach64 card
(which according to lspci, is an ATI 3D Rage I/II 215GT [Mach64GT]
(rev 41). I tried adding video=atyfb to the kernel arguments, that did
not affect it.

I constructed a patch which prevents the crash; not sure if it would
be much help in determining the true cause though. The patch just uses
wredrawln to claim that the 2 help lines are corrupt and asks for them
to be completely redrawn rather than just refreshed.

Another interesting point is that I can run all the ncurses test
programs except worm, which crashes in a few seconds, but only when
the console it's running on is actually visible. And, the blink and
underline attributes don't seem to work on my system.

Finally, I downloaded the kernel-image-2.4.12-powerpc package to see
if changing the kernel would make a difference. It did, the nano crash
disappeared. The worm crash is still present, though.

I can continue trying to trace the problem in worm, if there's
interest, since it's present in both kernels. Or if there's interest
in the kernel 2.2.19 nano problem, whatever... I am interested in
helping track down the problem because it's such a hard crash. My
filesystem is of course damaged when I have to hard reboot.

I signed up to the list. Let me know what I can try. And Happy
Thanksgiving!

--
*----------------------------------------------------------------*
|  .''`.  |   Debian GNU/Linux: <http://www.debian.org>          |
| : :'  : |   debian-imac: <http://debian-imac.sourceforge.net>  |
| `. `'`  |      Chris Tillman        tillman at azstarnet.com      |
|   `-    |            May the Source be with you                |
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