On Sat, 21 Nov 2009, Faidon Liambotis wrote:

Justin Piszcz wrote:

quoted

Found root cause-- root cause is asterisk PBX software.  I use an

SPA3102.

quoted

When someone called me, they accidentally dropped the connection, I called
them back in a short period.  It is during this time (and the last time)
this happened that the box froze under multiple(!) kernels, always when
someone was calling.

<snip>

quoted

I don't know what asterisk is doing but top did run before the crash
and asterisk was using 100% CPU and as I noted before all other processes
were in D-state.

When this bug occurs, it freezes I/O to all devices and the only way to
recover
is to reboot the system.

That's obviously *not* the root cause.

It's not normal for an application that isn't even privileged to hang
all I/O and, subsequently everything on a system.

This is almost probably a kernel issue and asterisk just does something
that triggers this bug.

Regards,
Faidon

It is possible although I tried with several kernels (2.6.30.[0-9] & 
2.6.31+ (never had a crash with earlier versions, I installed asterisk long
ago) but it always used to be 1.4.x until recently..  Nasty bug :\

Justin.