Bug 141446

Summary:	swap must be off to prevent freezing during install
Product:	[openSUSE] SUSE LINUX 10.0	Reporter:	Zoltán Kovács <kovzol>
Component:	Installation	Assignee:	E-mail List <yast2-maintainers>
Status:	RESOLVED INVALID	QA Contact:	Klaus Kämpf <kkaempf>
Severity:	Critical
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	lslezak
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	x86-64
OS:	SuSE Linux 10.0
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Customer	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Zoltán Kovács 2006-01-04 20:35:14 UTC

Today I installed a SL10-OSS, DVD version at a friend. I experienced that after a while the installation process freezes. This happens about 1 minute after confirming to start the installation of the needed software (e.g. copying the packages onto the brand new system).

I found that the memory usage is increasing very fast. This machine has 512 MB of RAM. After filling it, the machine tried to use the swap space which was declared to use another 512 MB of the hard disk. The swap space was a newly defined partition: /dev/hda9, and the root partition went to /dev/hda10. Other partitions were already filled with WinXP, NTFS volumes.

Then I thought there was a swap problem. So when I pressed reset after freezing, I disabled the swap flag from /dev/hda9. This helped to solve my problem.

I don't understand what happened. I think the installation program should be good enough to create a working swap space. Unfortunately I haven't tried yet that the swap space is working at all after my successful installation or not.

Comment 1 Ladislav Slezák 2006-01-05 07:02:36 UTC

Was the freeze hard? Could you switch to another terminal? Any error message?

I have never observed such problem. Was the swap partition formatted during the installation or not? I have no idea what could be wrong... Thomas?

Comment 2 Zoltán Kovács 2006-01-05 07:30:26 UTC

Yes, the freeze was hard. I wasn't able to switch another terminal. However I tried to watch kernel messages on the terminals at once as I pressed "Confirm starting installation" (or something similar). What I saw was:

1. A kernel oops. The error message was: "Unable to handle kernel virtual paging request" --- that's why I tried to disable swap later.

2. Then I saw a kernel panic message and the terminal display became noisy --- the fonts became readable but looked confused. It seemed that the video memory became corrupted. My friend told me that he has problems with his video memory: in Windows he has to reboot the system to make the system work properly in each 3rd system bootup.

3. Here I got hard freeze as I saw the kernel panic message.

I also have never experienced such a behaviour. That's why I thought I should report this problem.

Comment 3 Ladislav Slezák 2006-01-05 08:08:54 UTC

It seems that there is probably a hardware problem, did you try memcheck? (It should be available in the boot menu on the DVD.) Let it run for several hours. Or try to change the video card.

Comment 4 Ladislav Slezák 2006-01-05 08:11:23 UTC

Please, post the results here.

Comment 5 Zoltán Kovács 2006-01-05 08:33:30 UTC

I tried a memtest at once as I found constant freezes. I only waited just one cycle because I was in a hurry. But OK, I'll try to do it again for a longer time.

Comment 6 Lukas Ocilka 2006-01-11 19:50:05 UTC

I see, this is obviously a hardware problem. If memtest reports errors (error on byte xyzfffddd [458.6MB] for instance) you should report this problem to the reseller of the computer and claim another one if the warranty is still valid. As you can see the problem is not only Linux-realted but it also appears in Windows. Windows don't use memory as drastically as Linux does.

Attention: running on broken hardware can corrupt your (friend's) data also in Windows!

How the erroneous memory (or some other hardware behaves), example:
- Installation reads packages from DVD and writes them to the disk
  (These data might be already corrupted)
- If there is not enough memory, the installation tries to swap out some data or programs
- Then, if the installation program have to read the data back from the swap, it might read a.) already corrupted data or b.) read good data but corrupt it after that in the memory. Please, note, that if you have an erroneous hardware (such as the memory card) and you have used the memory up to 100% you obviously have some corrupted data somewhere.

;) OK, sorry for bothering you, I'm not really going to write a novel about it :)

Comment 7 J. Daniel Schmidt 2006-01-16 17:45:12 UTC

Seems to be a hardware problem, so I'll close it.
Please reopen this bug, if the problem persists when using an error-free graphics adapter.