The following (or something similar) shows up now and then in my xterm when running debian etch with gnome:


Anyone have an idea what's going on here?

Message from syslogd@drip23 at Tue Sep 19 15:55:03 2006 ...
drip23 kernel: Bad page state in process 'events/0'

Could this have something to do with some input device, like a touch, mouse, keyboard or something? That's my guess. I'd try changing to a different kernel if no obvious hardware flaw can be found.

Not sure, but I believe that the "page" to which the message refers is a block of memory, so you might have a bad RAM chip set. Many "live" cd's include an option to boot memchk to test for memory problems. Some distribution installation CDs also give you an option to check your memory chip sets.

Note, however, that the checks can be quite time consuming. (I ran one once on a 1 Gb system, and it took half a day to isolate the problem.)

Another possibility is that your RAM is so small that your swap file is in use, and you've got a bad spot in the swap partition. If the memchk doesn't find any problem, try creating a different swap partition, and switching your system to use it. (This possibility is not very likely, since the disk hardware will ussually detect the problem before your swapped memory page is returned, and a different error message is generated. Often your system just "hangs" on disk I/O errors.)

Another possibility: Excessive heat in your system. Do you monitor you system using, e.g., GKrellM or a similar monitoring program?

Sorry about the delay. I have gkrellm which reports no sensors found (may need to install something?). When I run mbmon (I think that's it, but I'm elsewhere now so not sure) it shows temps within acceptable limits. Maybe I'll run that all night, piped to a file. If a lock occurs I can see what the last temp was.

The mb is an old msi with an athlon t-bird, which runs warm, so I moved it out of my desk enclosure, which helps. Also, I recently replaced a dvd and cd-rw with a combo drive, but I don't think that would cause lock-ups.

Try installing lm-sensors to get messages on the onboard sensors.

Done, will experiment later, thanks.

EDIT;
well, when I call 'sensors' from the command line it shows:

# sensors
Can't access procfs/sysfs file
Unable to find i2c bus information;
For 2.6 kernels, make sure you have mounted sysfs and libsensors
was compiled with sysfs support!
For older kernels, make sure you have done 'modprobe i2c-proc'!