on Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 11:01:57PM +0000, Ricardo Campos wrote:
Hmmm.... continuing problems since my last recompile (of 2.4.17). (i.e. these didn't used to happen...)
It didn't used to happen with some other kernel version, or it didn't happen with a previous configuration of linux 2.4.17?
- If I need to do anything that is intensive disk-wise (writing large
files to disk), I am unable to do anything else, otherwise the system locks up. A symptom of this, for example, is that xmms loops about a second of the MP3 I'm playing. X does not respond to ctrl-alt-backspace, the system doesn't respond to ctrl+alt+del.
I think xmms probably seems to be looping the MP3 because the audio is buffered somewhere (possibly sound card, maybe kernel) I have seen similar problems under win32 on a laptop, but the trigger was high network traffic. Did you disable some work around in the kernel config that you left enabled before? e.g. the CMD640 chipset bugfix and the RZ1000 chipset bugfix (they probably don't apply, but there might be something like that)
If you still have your old kernel, you might want to try booting it and comparing the output from dmesg right after it boots and the output from dmesg right after the new kernel boots. If you have the kernel config for both, you could of course compare them. The kernel configs are in /usr/src/linux/.config or /usr/src/linux/.config.somethingelse, or /usr/src/linux-version/.config*
diff(1) is a nice, fast way of comparing files like these.
- Although I have not changed my etc/fstab file, on booting, the system
refuses to mount a vfat partition ("wrong fs type, bad superblock or wrong option"). If I mount it manually as root, I can access the partition (but only as root). I DID compile in vfat, DOS and UMSDOS support.
The error suggests it is trying to mount the partition as an ext2 filesystem, so either the field is incorrect in /etc/fstab, or it is just deciding to ignore it. When you mount it as root, do you explicitly say "mount -t vfat"? If not, then it sounds like something is deciding to ignore the type in /etc/fstab at boot up or is forcing it to try ext2.
Unfortunately, I cannot seem to view anything but the X server logs in /var/logs , as it says that the file is not viewable. How could I view these log files? Which one should I look at? Any parameters I can pass on at boot to enable more verbose logging?
You may want to check the permissions on /var/log; root should definitely be able to view files in /var/log.
Which file to look at depends on your configuration, but generally the files "messages" or "syslog" will have kernel error messages. If you can bring up a shell, running "dmesg" will show them too.