[Haifux] Kernel oops, so what?

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 10:49:41PM +0200, Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 4:27 PM, Eli Billauer <eli at billauer.co.il> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> >
> > Maybe this is a "boker-tov-eliyahu" thing, but still. I've installed
> > Fedora 12, just to find out that it warns me about kernel oopses. In my
> > remote memories, I recall that a kernel oops usually meant that my
> > hardware was cooking (in those days when Linux was rock solid and
> > hardware wasn't) and the computer froze completely.
> >
> >
> > Now I get an oops warning every now and then, but nothing really
> > happens. And I wonder what is going on? Has the dreaded oops become
> > something one can live with? And then there's this site which collects
> 
> Hypothesis: nowadays, machines have at least two cores. Even if
> something got seriously messed up on one core, there is still the
> other core still able to do something and recover somehow. 

Those two cores still share the same memory space. If a certain kernel
thread wrote to some unexpected in the kernel memory space, you'll have
problems later on. If a kernel thread existed unexpectedly and left some
resources in use, you may have a problem recovering.

> > Jan 15 14:45:17 test kernel: WARNING: at arch/x86/kernel/hpet.c:390
> > hpet_next_event+0x5c/0x81() (Not tainted)

But as Muli already noted, this is a warning, rather than a 'BUG'. The
kernel code in question did continue execution.

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