After a little investigation regarding the cron job which appeared to
be running when I first encountered this oops yesterday morning, I
discovered that in fact two scripts get fired off by cron at the same
time. They both do a ps as their first command. This prompted me to
try doing multiple ps commands at the same time. Bingo.
Here's a small script which will oops my machine in 5-60 seconds.
This occurs with 2.2.0, 2.2.0ac1 and 2.2.0ac2 kernels:
#!/bin/bash
while true ; do
ps alx | cat >/dev/null &
ps auxww | cat >/dev/null &
ps alx | cat >/dev/null &
ps auxww | cat >/dev/null &
ps alx | cat >/dev/null &
ps auxww | cat >/dev/null &
wait
echo -n x
done
It will happen with just two ps commands, but adding a few extra
seemed to make the script more likely to produce the "desired" result
more quickly. The cat's are there because the output of the ps
command in the scripts was being piped to another program. It's
unclear if that's a necessary component of the script, but it would be
easy enough to try it without -- but it didn't occur to me while I was
doing my testing with different kernels.
Again my machine is dual PII with SMP enabled. See my original
message under this Subject: for the details. My .config and any other
info available on request.
David
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