kernel panic

[Tom Metro]

My laptop is crashing pretty regularly with a kernel panic after 24 to
48 hours of uptime. Rolling back to the last two kernel versions hasn't
helped.

My attempts to leave the computer idle showing a virtual console also
hasn't been too successful at revealing the cause (see prior post on
difficulty in disabling the screen blanking feature). It did catch one,
but most of the information had scrolled off the screen. Lots of
"do_invalid_op" messages.

Another time I was able to catch a fragment of the log showing in a GUI
screenlet that shows dmesg output, and that one showed "iwlagn: can't
stop RX DMA", implicating the Intel WiFi hardware or driver. That led me
to some suggestions to try turning up the power saving level on the
Intel card on the theory that it is overheating. I tried that. I
monitored the temperature via
/sys/bus/pci/drivers/iwlagn/0000:05:00.0/temperature
before and after the power setting change, and it always hovered around
67, whatever that means (67 C?). And a day later the system crashed again.

The logs saved to disk don't show anything relevant, which I guess is
usual for a kernel panic. My recollection is that the only way to
capture the output of a kernel panic is to capture the output of the
serial console. Is that still true?

Hmmm...maybe a "blue screen of death" isn't such a bad design.

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/