Recently I've suffered two crashes of my Mandrake system. The screen becomes a senseless (and frozen) mass of blue pixels, and the keyboard locks. A hard reboot is necessary.

Syslog talks about a Bad EIP value, but I don't know what to make of this, let alone how to correct it. (ie this seems to be a hardware or module issue, but how do I diagnose it?)

Here is an excerpt from my syslog:

Oct 19 10:32:52 kernel: Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at
virtual address 0000002b
Oct 19 10:32:52 kernel: printing eip:
Oct 19 10:32:52 kernel: 0000002b
Oct 19 10:32:52 kernel: *pde = 00000000
Oct 19 10:32:52 kernel: Oops: 0000
Oct 19 10:32:52 kernel: isofs nls_iso8859-15 udf ppp_deflate bsd_comp nvidia
sd_mod i810_audio ac97_codec ppp_async ppp_generic slhc ipt_state ipt_REJECT ip
t_limit ipt_LOG ip_conntrack_ftp ip_conntrack iptable_filter ip_tables af_packet
sr_mod floppy nvnet supermount ide-cd cdrom ide-scsi scsi_mod tuner tvaudio btt
v videodev i2c-algo-bit soundcore lirc_i2c lirc_dev i2c-core ehci-hcd usb-ohci u
sbcore rtc ext3 jbd
Oct 19 10:32:52 kernel: CPU: 0
Oct 19 10:32:52 kernel: EIP: 0010:[<0000002b>] Tainted: P
Oct 19 10:32:52 kernel: EFLAGS: 00010096
Oct 19 10:32:52 kernel: EIP is at E Using_Versions+0x2a/0xc01d882f
Oct 19 10:32:52 kernel: eax: c2767464 ebx: 00003246 ecx: c12c72dc edx:
00000006
Oct 19 10:32:52 pppd[11304]: Terminating on signal 15.
Oct 19 10:32:52 kernel: esi: cdd2e558 edi: 0000001c ebp: bffff440 esp:
cdd30000
Oct 19 10:32:52 kernel: ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss: 0018
Oct 19 10:32:52 kernel: ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss: 0018
Oct 19 10:32:52 kernel: Process X (pid: 1999, stackpage=cdd2f000)
Oct 19 10:32:52 kernel: Stack:
Oct 19 10:32:53 kernel: Call Trace:
Oct 19 10:32:53 kernel:
Oct 19 10:32:53 kernel: Code: Bad EIP value.

Comments and advice are welcome!

Sorry to reply to my own post, but this problem is still present (and recurring frequently, especially when running Wine).

The last time the log messages were virtually identical to those given above (although EFLAGS read 00210096)

If anyone has seen an EIP message, I'd appreciate any thoughts. What hardware is likely to cause this? Or is it apt to be a kernel module?

Should I be recompiling, or swapping a component?

Thanks guys.