[FredLUG] Re: how do I troubleshoot a kernel panic?

[Peter Larsen]

Hey Chris,
Kernel panics are rather tricky and I would go as far as to say you need
to know quite a bit of kernel programming before they make sense. With
some panics you do get a coredump - use that with the debug tools to
investigate the stack-dumnp and find out which program is the offending
one. This is the easy part. The hard part is finding out why.

Downgrading the kernel without taking glibc libraries into the mix is
asking for trouble. 

Most panics I've had are all hardware/module related. Bad hardware or
bad drivers.

http://www.mulix.org/lectures/kernel_oopsing/kernel_oopsing.pdf
http://magazine.redhat.com/2007/08/15/a-quick-overview-of-linux-kernel-crash-dump-analysis/

Both links should give you details and ideas on how to proceed. Be fore
warned - this is rather technical. But not impossible to figure out.

Regards
  Peter Larsen

On Sat, 2009-05-09 at 17:07 -0400, Chris O'Donnell wrote:
> I downgraded my wife's laptop (Toshiba Satellite 1GHZ / 512 RAM) to fix
> a font corruption bug that was introduced on Ubuntu 8.10 and made the
> laptop unusable in 9.04. The font bug is not present on 8.04, which is
> the long term support version of Ubuntu. However, I'm now having
> problems with kernel panic crashes (as evidenced by the flashing caps
> lock light with a dark screen). It happens pretty much every day. I
> never had the crash problem with 8.10.
> 
> Any hints on how to troubleshoot?
> 
> > 
-- 
Peter Larsen <ego.alter at gmail.com>


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