Crash: DWARF2 unwinder stuck at apic_timer_interrupt

[Tom Horsley]

On Tue, 14 Nov 2006 18:13:14 +0000
Albert Graham <agraham at g-b.net> wrote:

> Can anyone throw any light on this, it happens about 5 times a day :(, 
> but does not always immediately crash the machine, but usually.
> 
> I got the same messages with the previous kernel (2.6.18-1.2798.fc6)
> 
> Also, the kernel is NOT tainted.
> TIA:
> 
> Albert.
> 
> PS. What is DWARF2  - a better version than DWARF :(

I don't know what the crash is about, but I think (never positive
about this stuff :-) that the dwarf2 message has nothing to do with
the crash. The crash is due to something else, the kernel is trying
to print a backtrace and it can't do the backtrace because the
debug info it relies on is busted (or the code reading the debug
info is busted).

Part of the dwarf2 debug info standard (or gnu extensions to it)
includes special section in the object file which, in theory,
describe stack frames well enough to backtrace through them
(but anytime you hit hand coded assembly, you usually hit hand
coded frame descriptions too and they are always wrong :-).