I started writing this entry the other day, but it was killed due to a#

Sat Jan 11 04:43:03 2003

I started writing this entry the other day, but it was killed due to a kernel problem.

My phone didn't come back, as such. Instead they gave me a new one, so that really ought to fix the problem. Thank you, Botley Road Oxford branch of Carphone Warehouse

All things considered, less done this week than I might have hoped to do. Having got the phone back, I obviously needed to get the numbers back into it - having cut and pasted the first two into cu, I decided to write a short perl program to do the rest automatically. Whee. Flashing caps lock light time. OK, let's do (almost) what I should have done instead and write it in lisp (I say "almost" because it's actually a shell script starting #!/usr/bin/clisp). Flash bang wallop #2. Hmm. Some poking around reveals that the device objects to having close() called, but as the oops is actually a full-blown kernel panic (in sched.c) and even stuff like magic sysrq only just about works, it's not going to be easy to get a log for.

(Some IRC people did recommend a serial console. Well, yes, but . If I had a serial port, I'd have plugged the phone in there in the first place and wouldn't need to be screwing around with USB.)

So I (forward ported to 2.4.21-pre3, wrote debian init scripts for, and) installed LKCD to get some kind of crash dump I could actually use. That seems to fixed things all by itself - at least, now I cannot replicate the problem.

The upside of all this is that 2.4.21-pre3 has some kind of sane memory usage patterns and once again I have a laptop that doesn't thrash itself for tens of seconds at a time on simple operations. My spies tell me that these days ac kernels are using some variant of the rmap VM, and nonac kernels are not. So, probably going to blame rmap. Maybe it's badly tuned. I still have LKCD installed for when I do manage to crash the machine using USB serial, but let's upload this diary entry first, shall we?