[conspire] Kernel failure

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> Computer running Debian.  Installed in September.
> 
> On several occasions a pop-up window says I had a kernel failure and asks if I want to share the details with the Debian developers.  When the most recent one occurred, the only application running was Open Office.
> 
> 1) Should I be concerned?
> 2) Is it advisable or not to share it with the developers?

Couldn't hurt to file a bug against the Debian 2.6.32-5 'bigmem' kernel
compiled for 686.  This was a kernel 'oops', as they're called, one
having to do with memory management, and it smells to me a lot more like
a genuine kernel bug than any sort of hardware problem.  (One must
always bear in mind that the latter is a possible root cause.)  

Notice there was a bug about this in the pre-Squeeze/6.0 kernel, which
was 2.6.26-2:  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=566312
They closed / archived the bug because they believed it to be fixed in
the then-impending 2.6.32-1 kernel that would be offered starting with
Debian Squeeze/6.0.

It seems to come up a bit:
http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-kernel@lists.debian.org/msg71354.html

Web-searching for 

  debian 2.6.32 BUG: unable to handle kernel paging request

finds a number of hits, usually but not always involving VM software
(Xen, Virtualbox, etc.)  You might want to dig into those and see if you
can spot patterns.  Also, you might want to see if your Debian branch
also offers a later distro precompiled kernel.