swap_info_get: Bad swap offset entry 0200f8a7

From: Christian Kujau
Date: Sun Oct 15 2017 - 20:23:49 EST


Hi,

every now and then (and more frequently now) I receive the following
message on this Atom N270 netbook:

swap_info_get: Bad swap offset entry 0200f8a7

This started to show up a few months ago but appears to happen more
frequently now:

4 May < Linux version 4.11.2-1-ARCH
4 Jun < Linux version 4.11.3-1-ARCH
7 Jul < Linux version 4.11.9-1-ARCH
4 Aug < Linux version 4.12.8-2-ARCH
24 Sep < Linux version 4.12.13-1-ARCH
158 Oct < Linux version 4.13.5-1-ARCH

I've only found (very) old reports for this[0][2] with either no
solution[1] or some hinting that this may be caused by hardware errors.

In my case howerver no kernel BUG messages or oopses are involved and no
PTE errors are logged. The machine appears to be very stable, although
memory usage is quite high on that machine (but no OOM situations so
far either). As the machine is only equipped with 1GB of RAM, I'm
using ZRAM on this system, which usually looks something like this:

$ zramctl
NAME ALGORITHM DISKSIZE DATA COMPR TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT
/dev/zram0 lz4 248.7M 195.7M 74M 78.7M 2 [SWAP]

I suspect that, when memory pressure is high, zram may not be quick enough
to decompress a page leading to these messages, but then I'd have expected
a zram error message too.

Can anybody comment on these messages? If they're really indicating a
hardware error, shouldn't there be other messages too? So far, rasdaemon
has not logged any errors.

Thanks,
Christian.

[0] http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0204.3/0165.html
[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=432337
[2] https://access.redhat.com/solutions/218733
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