[TriLUG] Laptop Hell

[Ken Mink]

Hi Folks,
  The subject pretty much decribes how I'm feeling right now.

  I recently bought a HP Pavilion laptop. It has a 1GHz Duron processor
and uses the VIA KN133 chipset. It's a nice machine and was a good deal.

  The good news: I installed RH7.2. It went fine. It was not able to
automagicly determine the video card, but I was able to manually select
it. It did pick up the sound card and the USB ports.

  Then bad news: Once I rebooted, I discovered that Linux was completely
unstable. Once the system boots, it doesn't last more than a few minutes
before I get errors like the following;

Oops: 0000
CPU:    0
EIP:    0010:[<c012d386>]    Not tainted
EFLAGS: 00010202
EIP is at zone_inactive_plenty [kernel] 0x6
eax: 00000000   ebx: 00000000   ecx: ffffffff   edx: c13e9ff8
esi: c13e9fdc   edi: c13e9ff8   ebp: 00000055   esp: c1407fb4
ds: 0018   es: 0018   ss: 0018
Process kswapd (pid: 5, stackpage=c1407000)
Stack: 00000000 c13e9fdc c012e611 00000000 c1406000 00000000 c1406000
00000006
       c1406241 0008e000 c012ea16 00000006 00010f00 cef8dfb8 c0105000
c0105746
       00000000 c012e970 c02cdfc4
Call Trace: [<c012e611>] refill_inactive_scan [kernel] 0x61
[<c012ea16>] kswapd [kernel] 0xa6
[<c0105000>] stext [kernel] 0x0
[<c0105746>] kernel_thread [kernel] 0x26
[<c012e970>] kswapd [kernel] 0x0


Code: 8b 98 fc 00 00 00 85 db 75 04 31 c0 eb 1f 8b 70 4c 8b 48 48

You'll notice that it was the swapper that died. That's just the one I
grabbed for the message. There doesn't seem to be any pattern about
which processes die. Sometimes it's during boot and sometimes it will
run for a few minutes. Again, no pattern.

I talked about this with a friend who suggested that there was a
hardware problem; bad memory or processor. Well, I ran the XP that can
with it for quite a while and no hiccups. This makes me think that there
is no hardware fault.

I've tried a custom compiled 2.4.17 kernel, compiled on another machine.
I also installed 2.4.9-21-athlon from the 7.2 update. Both had no
effect.

One more thing that is really odd. It runs fine from the 7.2 rescue
disk. I've run it for an hour or more to copy stuff through the network
with the rescue disk and it just hummed. Go figure.

Does anybody have any thoughts? I don't know what to try. And CompUSA is
going to hit me with a 15% open box charge if I try to return it. That's
a whole other thread in it's self.

TIA
Ken
-- 
Ken Mink
Porivo Technologies, Inc.
919.806.0566 | mailto:ken.mink at porivo.com
http://www.porivo.com
Measuring end-to-end Web performance.