On Tuesday 01 August 2006 16:41, Andrew Morton wrote:

On Mon, 31 Jul 2006 19:04:33 +1000
Herbert Xu [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

2) There is something broken in the x86_64 unwind code which is causing
it to panic just about everytime somebody calls dump_stack().

Andi, this is the second time I've seen a report where an otherwise
harmless dump_stack call (the other one was caused by a WARN_ON) gets
turned into a panic by the stack unwind code on x86_64.  This particular
report is with 2.6.18-rc3 so it looks like whatever bug is causing it
hasn't been fixed yet.

Could you please have a look at it? Thanks.

Jan thinks this might have been fixed by a patch which he sent Andi a
couple of days ago.  Andi has sent that patch to Linus

I didn't send that particular patch before, just queued it, because I didn't realize
that particular crash, but I have now send it yesterday. So far L. hasn't merged
it unfortunately, but I will resend.

but I'm not sure 
which patch it was

 
"entry-more-unwind" was my version, there was another one from Jan

and I'm not sure whether it has been merged into 
mainline.

But yes, -rc3 unwind has problems.

"unwinder stuck" messages are expected and not really fatal because they
don't lose any information. I expect it will need some releases to work
them all out fully, but then we'll hopefully have a much better unwinder
that doesn't generate any false positives anymore.

New crashes during unwinding are fatal though and I plan to fix them.
So far this one was the only known one.

I already got a lot of patches queued for .19 that fix more unwind
information in a lot of assembly files. Still not fully complete though.
Fixing it all properly unfortunately requires undoing some stuff, e.g.
the unwinder cannot deal with separate lock sections, so I was slowly
removing them.

-Andi