Published on 29 November 2014 09:46 AM EST
Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel
When Linux 3.18-rc6 was released last Sunday, Linus Torvalds noted in the release announcement that a "a big unknown worry in a regression" remained. Nearly one week later, kernel developers are still figuring out what's going on with this regression that can cause frequent lockups. Worse off, it looks like it might affect the Linux 3.17 kernel too.
Dave Jones of Red Hat was the one to first report his experience of frequent lockups with the Linux 3.18 kernel. At the time he found Linux 3.17 to be okay but under 3.18 he experience lockups with a kernel panic but the origin of the issue was tough to gather.
Since Sunday, Dave Jones has continued with his testing -- which at times can be putting load on the kernel for a day to see if the issue occurs -- which is resulting in tracking down this issue being a long and tedious process. In the kernel mailing list thread relating to the issue, this week there were some interesting comments:
The issue might be related to Xen. A patch dating back to 2005 was pushed for Xen to fix a vmalloc_fault() path that was similar to what was reported by Dave. The patch had a comment that read "the line below does not always work. Needs investigating!" But it looks like this issue was never properly investigated.
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