[Virtual-pkg-base-maintainers] Bug#443375: base: occational crashes on shutdown/logout/suspend/hibernate

[Christian Gogolin]

Package: base
Severity: critical
Justification: breaks unrelated software

Fore about 6 weeks I am suffering from crashes under Debian Lenny on my Samsung X20 notebook.

When the system crashes two monochrome pixel patterns are displayed by turns with a frequency of about 1/2 second. The majority of such a pattern is black with brighter, noisy bunches with a grating of approximately the size of a character on the tty's. The screen resolution seams to be 640x480 at that time.
Directly after the crash the hard disk LED glows, but after a short time it turns off and the hard drive spins down.
The notebook does not respond to anything, no response to keyboard (not even the keyboard LEDs), no ping answers - nothing.

After a hard reset upon boot the machine complains about not unmounted ext3 partitions but has always recovered just fine.

The crashes occur only in the following situations:

1) During logout before gdb should be visible again.

2) On shutdown, approximately at that time at which normally the screen turns black for a moment before the firs shutdown messages are displayed.

3) On suspend to ram/disk. I even had a crash during a suspend to ram from single user mode without a running x-server.

The crash occurs approximately every 4th to 6th time one of the above "critical" actions is performed.
I found no way to reproduce the crash reliably.

I experienced crashes with both the 2.6.18 and 2.6.21 stock kernels an several custom made 2.6.21 kernels both worked fine before.

A hardware Problem can be excluded. I checked the memory and hard disk extensively and the systems works flawless even under high stress. Moreover I found an other user in a German Debian community (http://www.debianforum.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=89507) experiencing the same problem on the same notebook.

As far as I can tell the log-files unfortunately do not contain any useful information.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.21cg06
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash