[Hardy] lockup on HP Compaq NC4000

Ah, it's a sign of a kernel panic isn't it?

I had this happen again last night, about an hour after booting but seconds after starting Firefox 3 Beta 4 for the first time.

This would suggest that it is something connected with the browser, but it's annoyingly not consistent.

I've upgraded to kernel 2.6.24-14 and let's see if it happens again.

No, twice in a few minutes, both times with Firefox doing something,

Well, Firefox is innocent - three lockups this evening, all within about five minutes of (re)booting, all without Firefox running, and all with Update Manager trying to download all of 75M of updates before it happened again.

Now on kernel 2.6.24-15, and let's see....

No, and another one (albeit longer than five minutes after booting).

Oh, MemTest86+ reckons the RAM is ok, but clearly something isn't.

Still happening with the 2.6.24-16 kernel.

Arrggghhhh.

It didn't happen with Ubuntu 7.10 and this makes 8.04 risky to use.

My current thought is that it is network related (rt61 drivers?) because it seems to happen with Firefox (usually) or update-manager is downloading something.

Let's have a browse for other people seeing this... because I can't be alone, can I?

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and investigate it.

The Caps Lock blinking indicate a kernel crash, so please, include the following additional information, as required by the Ubuntu Kernel Team:
- uname -a > uname-a.log
- cat /proc/version_signature > version.log
- dmesg > dmesg.log
- sudo lspci -vvnn > lspci-vvnn.log

Thanks in advance.

Thanks - it's still happening with the RC on a reformatted root partition.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/+source/linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.24/+bug/134660 - comment 140 et seq for more on the wireless card and what I have to do to make it work.

Part of the problem is that when it happens, any useful info in dmesg is lost when the write isn't committed - see the log for lots of orphaned bits of the disk being recovered.

It will stay happily at the login prompt forever, but crashes about five minutes into a session using the wireless card... sometimes.

rt2x00.serialmonkey.com -

"two days ago, January 24th, Linux Kernel 2.6.24 was released. This is the first mainline kernel that includes (sadly a somewhat buggy) rt2x00 release."

Could this be the issue? I don't think I've had a lockup when wireless networking has not been on.

Today, there have been nine or ten of these, and this is the first time it's stayed up - with internet access - for hours.

In case there's any clue in any differences, here's the dmesg from this time.

Can you reproduce the bug from a text console or connect to the computer by ssh like is described in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DebuggingSystemCrash ?

I'll give ssh a try.

The session mentioned above crashed a few minutes later :(

However it did 'leave' a Firefox 3 Beta 5 session that does reliably cause a lockup every time it is reloaded. I can email it to someone, but it's GMail, here, Amazon and a couple of other sites.

Interestingly, it turns out that I no longer need to change the setup (DHCP -> static IP or vice versa) of the wireless card before it will work at all... for a few minutes at least.

I've just had a 'recovery mode' to root command line login session that included downloading several hundred megabytes of data without a problem.

Reboot into the standard graphical shell and it locked up in a couple of minutes while reloading a crashed Firefox session.

I'll have another try at crashing it via the text console, but I suspect it won't co-operate :)

I've just upgraded to the official release of Hardy, and I've also installed Firefox-2

We'll see if it happens with the latter...

Yes, it does - so it's not a Firefox 2 vs Firefox 3b5 issue.

maybe a X lockup,.. Can you attach ~/.xsession-errors and /var/log/Xorg.0.log ?
it's still Caps Lock blinking when freeze?

Both Caps Lock and Num Lock in sync, yes.

Ah ha!

A lockup in a 'boot to root' console. I was running a DNS lookup program (http://www.summary.net/soft/dnstran.html) so it was networking away.

Screenshot attached, complete with stack trace.

So it looks very much like it is the wireless card drivers... and to reinforce the annoyingly inconsistent nature of this, it followed streaming 'high qualify' video from the BBC website (and doing more DNS lookups) without problems for about an hour before it locked up. This time, it took a couple of minutes of just the lookups.

Let's see what happens if I try that again...

It locked up within about a minute.

Slightly different stack trace, so another picture attached.

A third lockup after a minute, that time with a stack trace so long it wouldn't fit on the screen, and another after trying adding 'acpi=force irqpoll' as suggested elsewhere here. The latter was after about five minutes, but...

I've installed the backports module recommended elsewhere, and it's looking good - no crashes so far.

The only minor moans are..

1. The wireless network won't restore after being woken from hibernation - I have to restart the laptop before it will work.

2. Both LEDs on the network card are permanently lit - normally they should only be on (typically flickering) when there's network action.

But that's a major improvement over not working.

Hi Ian,

Thanks for the constant testing and updates to this report. I was going to suggest trying to install the linux-backports-modules package as it has updated version of the rt2x00 drivers from serialmonkey. But it looks like you've already tried this with success. As a result I'm going to mark this fix released against the linux-backports-modules package.

Regarding the other misc bugs you also noted. Care to test the if this is still an issue with the latest Alpha for the upcoming Intrepid Ibex 8.10. You should be able to test via a LiveCD - http://www.ubuntu.com/testing. If these other issues still exist, can you please open a new report for each issue? The reason I say this is because it's easier for the kernel team to debug one specific issue per bug report. Thanks.

Its definitely not a firefox issue. I've had the panic without even firefox running.
I always get this when I restart my system. If I don't shut it down[which I usually don't], it'll be fine. But once I reboot, it panics, about 5-6 times...I went into recovery mode and even there it'll throw up panics.

I didn't have it in Fiesty. I think its an issue of the Hardy kernel.

One more thing..There is a pattern to this panic. Once it starts, it keeps happening frequently. Then after x number of panics, it stops entirely and becomes non-reproducible.
I'm not sure what is going on ... :(

Thanks - I'm using the live Intrepid alpha five and it's looking good. Lots of network use, no crashes.

The wireless card's lights are also flickering happily rather than being solidly on too, so that looks fixed.

I see there's a known bug relating to suspending at the moment, so I'll try that later.