Re: linux-2.1.44 on i586: Immediate crash on boot

Gerald Britton (gbritton@nih.gov)
Tue, 8 Jul 1997 08:48:39 -0400 (EDT)

> > The kernel crashes after mounting all disks, briefly flashes a console full
> > of weirdly colored characters and reboots. No messages make it to
> > /var/log/messages, nothing can be seen when it goes down either..
>
> Actually, just FYI, I've had this sort of thing happen in 2.1.42 as well.
> Hard freezes, hard freezes with screens full of flashing colored garbage,
> and spontaneous reboots were all frequent occurances.

I have gotten somewhat similar results with various kernels in the past,
though not as spectacular.. i've gotten random characters appearing on all
the consoles, these characters are often multi colored and appear to
accumulate over time. I assumed that this was a sign of kernel memory
corruption, so i synced my disks and rebooted (usually making it before an
oops or hard crash). This has been one of the most spectacular crashes
i've seen under Linux, under NT i've gotten even worse (and more frequent
than even 2.1.x kernels) crashes where the monitor goes into whitenoise :)

-- 
Gerald Britton
gbritton@nih.gov