Gidday,

I have a dual Athlon 2600+ system running Fedora Core 2, updated to kernel 2.6.7.
Recently the machine has locked up every few days (3/9/04, 9/9/04, 11/9/04). Every time it has been just after 4am, the time cron.daily is set to activate. In the case below, it crashed while running updatedb, but the actual process is not the same every time.

This coincides with /etc/cron.daily, which consists of:
00-logwatch 0anacron inn-cron-expire makewhatis.cron rpm slrnpull-expire tetex.cron
00webalizer cyrus-imapd logrotate prelink slocate.cron squirrelmail.cron tmpwatch

I have run memtest86 on this machine for several days and found no problems.

Relevant log message follows:

Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address ee67494e
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: printing eip:
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: 42c45e14
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: *pde = 00000000
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: Oops: 0000 [#1]
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: PREEMPT SMP
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: Modules linked in: snd_pcm_oss snd_mixer_oss nls_utf8 cifs snd_ens1371 snd_rawmidi snd_seq_device snd_pcm snd_page_alloc snd_timer snd_ac97_codec gameport snd soundcore nvidia w83627hf eeprom i2c_sensor i2c_isa i2c_amd756 i2c_core parport_pc lp parport autofs4 nfs lockd sunrpc e100 mii ipt_LOG ipt_limit ipt_state ipt_REJECT iptable_filter iptable_nat ip_conntrack iptable_mangle ip_tables floppy sg scsi_mod dm_mod uhci_hcd ehci_hcd button battery asus_acpi ac ext3 jbd
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: CPU: 0
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: EIP: 0060:[<42c45e14>] Tainted: P
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: EFLAGS: 00010246 (2.6.7-1.467custom)
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: EIP is at cifs_readdir+0x9c4/0xdf0 [cifs]
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: eax: 42c1e4a0 ebx: 00000000 ecx: ee674912 edx: 41c64da0
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: esi: 00000029 edi: 193c8bd6 ebp: 06c40860 esp: 403b4ee8
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: ds: 007b es: 007b ss: 0068
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: Process updatedb (pid: 19294, threadinfo=403b4000 task=2c538c30)
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: Stack: 403b4f48 05b88e24 04f991a0 42c1e4a0 403b4fa0 42c1e4a0 403b4f30 403b4f34
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: 00004f30 00004f30 05b88000 ee674912 41c0bde0 41c64da0 00057769 00000000
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: 00000000 00000000 00000001 00000000 002e1806 00000001 4137106c 36b015e0
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: Call Trace:
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: [<0217c33a>] vfs_readdir+0xba/0xe0
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: [<0217c750>] filldir64+0x0/0x180
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: [<0217c943>] sys_getdents64+0x73/0xc5
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: [<0217c750>] filldir64+0x0/0x180
Sep 3 04:08:03 vector kernel: Code: 8b 41 3c d1 e8 89 44 24 08 89 c8 83 c0 40 89 44 24 04 89 04

The 'Tainted' is caused by the Nvidia driver being installed.

any ideas what could be causing this? Kernel bug?
thanks,
Greg

Possibly a kernel bug -- IIRC I saw a similar problem posted to the kernel mailing list. You might consider updating to the latest 2.6.9 release candidate, or search the mailing list archives for more details (I have a feeling it may be fixed by now). A work around, of course, is to temporarily disable that cron job.