kernel bug

[Jarod Wilson]

On Thu, 2008-02-21 at 10:46 -0500, Ben Scott wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 10:23 AM, amc <acrossonlnx at comcast.net> wrote:
> > I have been getting a strange kernel bug on my laptop from time to
> time.
[...]
> > the bug says unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual
> > address 80370665 and gave me a lot of call trace info and stack info.
> > this problem only happens when I boot my laptop.
> 
>   What was is doing right before it crashed?  That is to say, what
> part of the boot process was it in?

The actual stack trace would also be exceedingly useful in helping
figure out exactly what went wrong... They aren't printed out for no
reason. :)


> On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 10:32 AM, amc <acrossonlnx at comcast.net> wrote:
> > I did noticed that some of the kernel crashed message had something about
> > ndiswrapper which I am using at the time due to how badly Broadcom works on
> > my laptop.
> 
>   ndiswrapper is not the most stable thing in the world.  On some
> hardware, it frequently causes kernel crashes.

A bit more background on that: ndiswrapper absolutely slaughters kernel
stack space. For this very reason, the linuxant folks provide kernels
built with 16k stacks, which is double the upstream kernel default, and
quadruple what Red Hat/Fedora use.


> One thing you can do
> is make sure you have the latest version of ndiswrapper installed, and
> then try different versions of the Windows network card driver you're
> trying to load.
> 
>   Is this wireless or Ethernet?  Do you know what particular Broadcom
> network controller your laptop has?

And if its broadcom 43xx wireless, I can vouch for the new b43 driver
actually being quite good. Wifi *sucked* on my old bcm43xx laptop up
until about 6 months ago when I started using the b43 driver. Your
kernel may or may not have a sufficiently new b43 (if any) -- like Ben
said, trying to do tech support for Gentoo is a bit... messy... :)


-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com