[PlanetCCRMA] I feel like a Hangman.

[Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano]

> now and then starting my sound fails (see log below). It also renders
> my network-connections unstable and makes startup of X to fail
> occasionly.

It is called a "kernel panic" or "oops", usually a bug in the kernel or
a driver (in this case alsa) triggers them. After one of them it is best
to reboot if the machine is not hung. The kernel might be left in a
weird state as those things should not happen at all :-)

> This only happens if I loading the alsa-drivers failed.
> 
> I'm using an YMFPCI.card and it got an own irq.
> 
> Here's the log-message I get:
> 
> <cut>
> Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address
> 0000001c
> printing eip:
> d0d221c2
> *pde = 00000000
> Oops: 0000
> CPU: 0
> EIP: 0010:[<d0d221c2>] Not tainted
> EFLAGS: 00010206
> eax: 00000000 ebx: d0d27aa0 ecx: 00000000 edx: 00000000
> esi: 00000800 edi: 00000000 ebp: c138d400 esp: cee69e94
> ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss: 0018
> Process modprobe (pid: 513, stackpage=cee69000)
> Stack: 00000000 00000000 d0d22000 00000000 00000046 cffa7fdc c02b73b0
> cee69ecc
> d0d25f78 00000292 00000000 c12addc0 00000282 d0d27aa0 d0d27b80
> c130ac00
> 00000000 c01f21c5 c130ac00 d0d27aa0 c130ac00 d0d27b80 00000000
> d0d22000
> Call Trace: [<d0d25f78>] [<d0d27aa0>] [<d0d27b80>] [<c01f21c5>]
> [<d0d27aa0>]
> [<d0d27b80>] [<c01f226c>] [<d0d27b80>] [<d0d22839>] [<d0d27b80>]
> [<c011d5fc>]
> [<d0d22060>] [<d0d26500>] [<d0d22060>] [<c010927f>]
> 
> Code: 8b 58 1c 85 db 74 09 83 cf 10 81 ce 00 80 00 00 c7 44 24 04
> <6>note: modprobe[513] exited with preempt_count 1 
> </cut>
> 
> I hope you have some ideas on where to start..

You could feed the text of the "oops" through ksymoops (just pipe it
through it). It will try to decode the weird numbers and transform them
into symbols. That could give an alsa guru (not me :-) some insights
into where the problem happened. 

If you decode it it might be worth posting in alsa-devel (it could be
that this has been fixed in current cvs). 

-- Fernando