pre-patch 2.0.31 Oops w/ gpm

Tim P. Gerla (timg@means.net)
Wed, 14 May 1997 05:36:49 -0500 (CDT)


I have been running 2.0.30 with the 31 pre-patch for about a week with no
problems other than an occasional try_to_free_page warning. I decided to
comment that printk statement out so those messages would stop, so I did
that, and compiled my kernel.

I had been using busmouse as a module, but in the kernel startup messages,
while loading modules, it SAID initalization had failed. But X worked
fine, ang gpm didn't display any error messages, but wouldn't let me use
the selection feature. There was just no mouse curser in console mode.

Thinking that maybe if I compiled busmouse directly into the kernel the
problem would go away and I could use selection. Nope...

Everything went as good as could be expected. (I have some bad ram.)
Booted it, everything went fine, until my rc script tried to start gpm, it
bombed like this:

Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual addres
current->tss.cr3 = 00afa000, Lr3 = 00afa000
*pde = 00102067
*pte = 00000027
Oops: 0000
CPU: 0
EIP: 0010:[con_write+1925/5584]
EFLAGS: 00010246
eax: 00000000 ebx: bffffd59 ecx: 00219400 edx: c0000000
esi: bffffd59 edi: 00000000 ebp: 00fb5000 esp: 00afbf7c
ds: 0018 es: 0018 fs: 002b gs: 002b ss: 0018
Process gpm (pid: 281, process nr: 19, stackpage=00afb000)
Stack: 00219400 bffffd59 00000000 bffffc18 00fb5000 00d5c000 00d5c
0012e1a7 00b25bd0 00219400 0000541c bffffd59 00afc018 08007
00000006 0000541c bffffd59 08007ebc 00000000 bffffc18 fffff
Call Trace: [file_ioctl+247/304] [system_call+85/128]
Code: 8a 0d 00 00 00 00 64 88 0b e9 d5 fa ff ff 8d b6 00 00 00 00

After that, all my letters WENT TO UPPERCASE. I could still log in, so
init was actually receiving lowercase letters. Running reset fixed this.

The all-uppercase problem happened a few days ago at bootup, but there
were no error messages.

I'm running a AMD 486/120, 16megs of (buggy) ram, some cheap clone
motherboard, Logitech busmouse connected to irq 5. If anyone needs more
info, let me know. Thanks!

-Tim

--
Tim P. Gerla | timg@means.net | http://timg.home.ml.org/ | Tybstar@IRC

Linux, The choice of a GNU generation.