From the PyCon feedback survey:
How do you troubleshoot completely random problems?
My home desktop machine has been suffering from a Linux kernel "Oops"
approximately once every two days for the last few weeks. I would really
like it to stop doing that. When I get a stack trace in my logs, it's
consistently in the "kswapd" process, even though I disabled all
swap weeks ago.
I'm running Edgy on this machine, just like I was running it on my laptop
and am running it on my work desktop. Those machines were both completely
stable (modulo occasional ndiswrapper issues) running the exact same
kernel.
It doesn't seem like it's a hardware issue. At least, the same machine has
never exhibited any problems under Windows.
It isn't deterministically reproducible. It always seems to be in response
to a click or some kind of user-input event during heavy disk I/O, but
flogging the disks and mashing the keyboard, even for hours at a time,
doesn't cause it to happen.
I am considering a fresh re-install to attempt a fix for this, but besides
the inelegance of that solution, it seems likely that it will leave me in
the same place.
Does anyone have a suggestion for tracking this down so that I'll actually
know that it's fixed?
You all thought I'd forget, didn't you? About the dire consequences, that is?
- Chrisopher has not responded yet.
-
Jonathan has not responded yet.Jonathan has responded.
- Travis has not responded yet.
-
Raffi has not
responded yet, but the Synthesis blog seems to be offline, and it isn't
really a personal thing anyway, so maybe I was out of line to tag him
there.
- Jason responded, but in a "friends only" post. Kind of borderline, there, but he's doing the best so far (except Jonathan) so I'm not going to give him a hard time.
My saga of ndiswrapper on the macbook continues.
In fact, the dw102 drivers do cause crashes when associating with
certain access points. Unfortunately the dw101 drivers don't work with
certain (still other) access points, and the lenovo "abgn" drivers have some
very peculiar problems with extremely bad UDP performance
on the access points the dw101 don't work with.
It occurred to me after a few hours of trolling for better drivers that, in
fact, there is a better way. Apple ships windows drivers specifically
for this exact card! You don't need to use drivers for
some other card with the same (or vaguely similar) chipset.
The Macintosh Drivers For Windows CD included with Boot Camp contains the
driver. Obnoxiously, it's encapsulated within a MSI file, within an EXE
installer, within a DMG image, inside the Boot Camp application. The only
way I could discover to get at the wireless driver was to install the whole
thing on a Real, Actual Windows Computer.
To access the driver CD if Boot Camp won't let you burn it, ctrl-click on
"/Applications/Utilities/Boot Camp Assistant.app" and click on "Show Package
Contents". Then, double-click on "Contents/Resources/DiskImage.dmg". Copy
the files on the thing that shows up on your desktop onto a USB key or
similar method of conveyance to a Windows machine, and run the
installer.
Obnoxious as this process is, it thankfully doesn't make you
install to a Windows installation on a Real Actual MacBook Core 2 Duo
laptop. Any old Windows machine will do. The installer helpfully puts
all the drivers into "C:\Program Files\Macintosh Drivers for
Windows XP 1.1.2". The files for the network card are in the "net5416"
folder.
Of course, they're also in a file called "net5416.tar.bz2" on my hard disk.
I think Apple might take a dim view of me providing a public download site
bereft of their unethical and
legally dubious EULAs, but if you can't get at the drivers for some
reason maybe I could let you have a copy.
Twisted is the goddamn engine of your Internet.
Don't let anyone say otherwise.
Update: We're over the line now - 33 to 32! Keep on voting though, make that bar bright green.
Don't let anyone say otherwise.
Update: We're over the line now - 33 to 32! Keep on voting though, make that bar bright green.