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#1 2005-11-11 13:51:17

tmadhavan
Member
From: Wales :D
Registered: 2004-03-26
Posts: 441

Pacman causing Recursive Kernel Error / Panic

Hey all, long time no see and all that. I've finally returned to using Arch, and it's been smooth so far.

Last night, I tried a pacman -Syu, and the upgrades necessary were psmisc, procps and some others (libungif I think).

Pacman bailed out, dumped me to a console with a stack trace of kernel calls and memory addresses, and something about a 'recursive kernel error'.

Right. So, reboot, and init scripts (rc.local, multi etc) were mysteriously missing.

Chucked in the boot cd, chrooted in and pacmanned initscripts. That sorted that problem. Oh, and pacmanned psmisc etc.

Some errors about 'could not write <blah>.tar.gz man entry. Permission denied'.

Another reboot and hotplug hangs. Same again, re pacman hotplug, removed it from rc.conf, booted OK, ran hotplug manually. OK.

So, now I thought I was out of trouble, and did another pacman -Syu. Load of xfce4 stuff, blah blah. Again, bails out, recursive error, this time with a message 'Recursive error fixed, but a reboot is required'.

The position now is that everything seems to be working, bit if I try to run pacman, sometimes it works (e.g. when I re pacmanned stuff) and usually it dumps me to that Recursive Error console.

I'm completely out of my depth with kernel errors like this.

Any ideas please? (Mod move this to kernel errors if nec. It seems Pacman-exclusive, so I put it here).

Venga,
Thom

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#2 2005-11-11 13:52:14

tmadhavan
Member
From: Wales :D
Registered: 2004-03-26
Posts: 441

Re: Pacman causing Recursive Kernel Error / Panic

Incidentally, my kernel, error, message logs appear to be blank.

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#3 2005-11-11 20:10:00

T-Dawg
Forum Fellow
From: Charlotte, NC
Registered: 2005-01-29
Posts: 2,736

Re: Pacman causing Recursive Kernel Error / Panic

did you follow the sticky at the top of this page regarding upgrading to kernel 2.6.13?

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#4 2005-11-12 11:31:47

tmadhavan
Member
From: Wales :D
Registered: 2004-03-26
Posts: 441

Re: Pacman causing Recursive Kernel Error / Panic

No, but I didn't upgrade to this kernel, it was installed onto a clean machine, with udev used from scratch.

Pretty weird eh?

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#5 2005-11-12 12:22:32

vacant
Member
From: downstairs
Registered: 2004-11-05
Posts: 816

Re: Pacman causing Recursive Kernel Error / Panic

Do you have S.M.A.R.T. on your hard drive and enabled in the BIOS? If so, any errors?

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#6 2005-11-12 16:21:28

tmadhavan
Member
From: Wales :D
Registered: 2004-03-26
Posts: 441

Re: Pacman causing Recursive Kernel Error / Panic

I do have it on the disks, and I believe it isn't active.

There's another problem. Sometimes when I try to Pacman something, it gets to the installing package... message, then hangs. If I change to a different VC it's alive, then as soon as I go back to VC7 I get a hard lockup.

Not sure if that's to do with my OLD gfx card.

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#7 2005-11-15 15:24:27

tmadhavan
Member
From: Wales :D
Registered: 2004-03-26
Posts: 441

Re: Pacman causing Recursive Kernel Error / Panic

Hi guys.

Think I've narrowed it down, but this is a bit weird.

SMART status of drives is good, pacman works for all packages except man-pages.

When I try to upgrade or remove man-pages, I get a load of reiser write errors, something about 'badness in kernel exit', then I get semi-responsive consoewhich eventually locks up.

So... rogue package by the looks. What could be making it do that though?? thought maybe memory trouble but the errors are reiserfs related by the looks. I occassionally get hard locks too, perhaps my machine is just wrecked. Man-pages issue first tho...

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#8 2005-11-15 18:45:02

JGC
Developer
Registered: 2003-12-03
Posts: 1,664

Re: Pacman causing Recursive Kernel Error / Panic

The manpages are on a piece of unreadable filesystem, which locks up the kernel. When you upgrade them, pacman triggers these errors.
Boot your system in single user mode, make sure the filesystem is either not mounted, or mounted read-only and run a reiserfsck on it.

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#9 2005-11-16 12:04:56

tmadhavan
Member
From: Wales :D
Registered: 2004-03-26
Posts: 441

Re: Pacman causing Recursive Kernel Error / Panic

OK, will try that.

Can I unmount the root filesystem after booting?

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#10 2005-11-16 12:40:44

tmadhavan
Member
From: Wales :D
Registered: 2004-03-26
Posts: 441

Re: Pacman causing Recursive Kernel Error / Panic

Sorry, I can just mount it ro, no?

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#11 2005-11-16 13:35:35

T-Dawg
Forum Fellow
From: Charlotte, NC
Registered: 2005-01-29
Posts: 2,736

Re: Pacman causing Recursive Kernel Error / Panic

I think you can do telinit S or telinit 1 to switch to single user mode. You can do

mount -o remount,ro /

to remount / to re-only.

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#12 2005-11-16 14:00:59

tmadhavan
Member
From: Wales :D
Registered: 2004-03-26
Posts: 441

Re: Pacman causing Recursive Kernel Error / Panic

Did all that, I'm gennig a note about there being errors on the dis that can only be fixeh using --rebuild-tree.

When I run that I get warnings about bad blocks and how I should backup my disk to another disk beforehand. Now, is it safe for me to fix this disk? Or is it likely to be a physical deformity of the disk?

Anyway, I can't afford a new disk and don't have a spare to backup to.... any bright ideas?

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