Oops: Kernel access of bad area

[Christian Kujau]

Hi,

I started some x11 application (here: firefox) through an ssh connection 
on a remote host and it crashed somehow. OK, no biggie, killed the 
application and be done with it. However, I noticed that the load of the 
machine is now constantly at 7. It's an iBook G4, has nothing to do, 
disks, cpu, netwokr is idle and load is usually < 1. Now it's not
slow to work or anyhow sluggish, but only the load is at 7 after the 
application crashed. When I looked into dmesg I saw:

[84983.750977] Unable to handle kernel paging request for data at address 0x4815d000
[84983.751046] Faulting instruction address: 0xc0012090
[84983.751157] Oops: Kernel access of bad area, sig: 11 [#1]
[84983.751178] PREEMPT PowerMac
[84983.751214] Modules linked in: nls_iso8859_15 nls_cp850 vfat fat isofs nls_base zlib_inflate radeon drm snd_powermac snd_pcm snd_timer snd soundcore snd_page_alloc fuse firewire_ohci firewire_core crc_itu_t ide_cd cdrom ssb bcm43xx rng_core ieee80211softmac uninorth_agp ieee80211 ieee80211_crypt agpgart
[84983.751750] NIP: c0012090 LR: c00165fc CTR: 00000080
[84983.751786] REGS: cea65b30 TRAP: 0300   Not tainted  (2.6.24-rc5)
[84983.751805] MSR: 00009032 <EE,ME,IR,DR>  CR: 24822282  XER: 00000000
[84983.751946] DAR: 4815d000, DSISR: 40000000
[84983.751965] TASK = ee372670[9138] 'firefox-bin' THREAD: cea64000
[84983.751984] GPR00: e62b3a00 cea65be0 ee372670 4815d000 00000080 1bc0c181 4815d000 ffffffff
[84983.752148] GPR08: 00010008 e62b3a00 00000000 c045f000 24822288 1002ea3c cea67690 ce954000
[84983.752315] GPR16: c0420000 c03f6400 cea65cac cea65ca8 c0440000 ce974480 c07d7180 ceba2280
[84983.752468] GPR24: e62b3a00 e62b3a50 4815d000 00000574 ceba2280 4815d000 1bc0c181 c07d7180
[84983.752665] NIP [c0012090] __flush_dcache_icache+0x14/0x40
[84983.752716] LR [c00165fc] update_mmu_cache+0x11c/0x120
[...]

This is the first time that this happened on this iBook, and it was not 
reproducible so far (well, it happened just a few minutes ago). Is this 
something to worry about? Or should I file this under "well, shit 
happens"? Btw, this 2.6.24-rc5 is from Linus' -git tree (15.12.2007).

Details and .config: http://nerdbynature.de/bits/2.6.24-rc5/

Thanks,
Christian.
-- 
BOFH excuse #281:

The co-locator cannot verify the frame-relay gateway to the ISDN server.