Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Tue, 30 Oct 2001 20:26:00 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Tue, 30 Oct 2001 20:25:50 -0500 Received: from neon-gw-l3.transmeta.com ([63.209.4.196]:15109 "EHLO neon-gw.transmeta.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Tue, 30 Oct 2001 20:25:38 -0500 Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 17:23:59 -0800 (PST) From: Linus Torvalds To: "Udo A. Steinberg" cc: , Subject: Re: oops on 2.4.13-pre5 in prune_dcache In-Reply-To: <3BDF51BE.4450888F@delusion.de> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Wed, 31 Oct 2001, Udo A. Steinberg wrote: > > For what it's worth - I've had a very similar oops ages ago. Back then it > was blamed on bad RAM, but ever since then I've run numerous memtest's > over it without finding anything and never had any problems later either. > > See here: > http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0101.0/0303.html Indeed. Same exact thing, different bit. It could easily be a wild pointer corruption - single-bit errors in RAM are not entirely uncommon (and as Al points out, they usually end up showing up in things like the dcache which can have long lists that are traversed fairly infrequently). But blaming the thing on bad RAM is not a good strategy if there are many of these reports. I'd love to see more of a pattern, though, because without a pattern there is nothing to really start from.. The pattern might be something as simple as "we're both using minixfs" or whatever. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/