I recently replaced the hard disk in my ThinkPad R51 with a solid state
drive and when I did so I installed Debian Wheezy LXDE updated with a
3.16 kernel as one of the boot options. I really am pleased with how the
system looks and acts except for a curious instability that occurs
increasingly frequently as uptime and/or suspend/resume cycles increase.
The symptom is that as time goes on more and more programs will cause a
segmentation fault while loading. For instance, emacs commonly is the
first program to go. Then maybe iceweasel. Just today iceweasel wouldn't
load at all but then following another suspend/resume cycle it now loads
to a point where it presents a safe mode dialog but then crashes if the
mouse pointer is moved over the dialog box.
The machine has 2GB of dram, an Intel 2200BG wireless card, and an
ATI/AMD mobility graphics subsystem. I mention the ram to show that it
has plenty, the 2200BG as it's driver will occassionally start using
100% of the CPU and must be reset by unloading and reloading ipw2200,
and the graphics subsystem as this machine is the only machine that I
have that contains an ATI/AMD graphics subsystem and the first where
I've used the open source radeon driver. Also, both the ipw2200 driver
and radeon driver require binary firmware blobs. One other item of
interest at least to me, is that I've configured the machine with a
smaller swap file, 1GB, than the size of physical memory. I'm not
positive, but this may be the only machine that I've personally
configured that has a swap file smaller than physical memory.
This is the eighth machine where I've installed Debian Wheezy or Jessie
and I've not previously encountered a similar problem. I was getting to
think I understood linux a bit but now I'm thinking I need a whole new
layer of debug/diagnostic techniques. The reason that I'm posting about
this is that I'm reasonably convinced that this is not a symptom of
flaky hardware. I've checked the system memory with various tools and
there is no obvious problem. Significantly for me, Windows XP and 7 both
run on this system without any problems, well no vaguely similar
problems. And I've been using this machine with Windows XP for more than
10 years. Just as an aside, Windows 7 is not really an option on this
machine as there is no available Radeon Mobility graphics driver, making
videos not really playable.
I'm reasonably certain that the problem is not configuration related.
I've used 3.2, 3.12 and 3.14 kernels on this box and all behave
similarly to the 3.16 kernel. I've also used Debian Jessie and though
segmentation faults are not reported, in the same creeping fashion the
loader will begin to refuse to load certain programs, and though right
now I can't remember the exact cryptic error the whole problem feels as
if it is just a different manifestation of the segfault problem on Wheezy.
I've looked around a bit on the internet for similar problems and come
up short. In fact, this class of problem seems inherently difficult to
drive to ground, at least with the knowledge that I currently possess.
So what I hope is that the Debian mailing list can give me some good
seeds for new knowledge to acquire. In particular I'd be interested in
how others might have approached similar situations. I've tried loading
emacs and iceweasel with gdb to get stack backtraces. With emacs,
absolutely no symbols. With iceweasel, a few symbols and it appears that
the crash happens during a memory free operation. I've looked at
compiling a debug version of emacs but that isn't trivial, still in
progress. The whole exercise has got me wondering if there are any other
debug/diagnostic options to try before recompiling various parts of the
system. One last specific question that sort of embarrasses me to ask,
is where should segmentation fault messages be logged? I've grepped
around and there are a few segfault messages from maybe a week ago in
kern.log.1 and messages.1, but nothing in kern.log or messages.log.
Perhaps these are still in a memory ring buffer somewhere? Is there some
sort of tool for viewing user space log messages, I mean other than
dmesg which doesn't appear to show any user space messages?
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