[ale] Kernel Panic.....task[0] swapper killed

[Michael David Ivey]

My friend's box just went belly-up, and I'm wondering if anyone else has 
seen a similar problem spontaneously occur.  Basically, it was a win95 / 
linux box, and the thing ran fine for about a week, then it just died.

I tried to tell him it was because win95 is evil, but he wants real 
answers.  

So, the problem:

When it boots from floppies, it gets into the boot process, bitches about 
unknown PCI devices, then finds the serial ports, and dies with a blaze 
of hexdecimal:

general protection: 0000
EIP:     0010:00000058
EFLAGS:  00010293

<other stuff deleted>

kfree of non-kmalloced memory: 001d2aa4, next = 00000000, order=0
task[0] (swapper) killed: unable to recover
kernel panic: trying to free up swapper memory space
In swapper task - not syncing


So, I tried to tell CMOS there was no HD, and it still happened, so I 
suspect the memory.  Any suggestions, before I start ripping pieces out 
of his box?

Thanks.

-michael




 
Michael Ivey, Director of Computer Operations   |  ivey at gsu.edu
Georgia State Television                        |  http://gstv.gsu.edu/~ivey
                            
Key to UNIX:
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);'