[plug] RH6 shutdown problem

[Matt Kemner]

On Tue, 31 Aug 1999, Bret Busby wrote:

> The other is an AMD K6-2 300 based system, with 64MB RAM, and it crashes after
> shutting down. It gets to "System  halted", then produces a screen of error
> text, with, a few lines from the top, an error indicating a kernel paging fault.

Congratulations - You have seen your first "Kernel OOPS" :)

> Firstly, is it possible to somehow extract the text that is displayed, as the
> text being displayed, is displayed after the "System halted" message?

Pen and paper? :)
Someone suggested using a digital camera...
You can also boot with "serial console" support so that all kernel
messages are output over a null-modem link to another PC (for example)

> Secondly, does anyone have any idea what is happening?

I've seen this problem before, and seen it reported on the kernel list
before, and it seems it's a BIOS bug that's triggering it, and that it may
have something to do with power management (APM)
There's a comment in the 2.2 kernel source (arch/i386/kernel/apm.c)
that says:
"Fix OOPS at power off with no APM BIOS by Jan Echternach" with comments
around it suggesting it was fixed sometime after 2.1.87

What kernel version are you running?
Does your BIOS have APM support and have you disabled it?

I've found on the systems I've seen the problem on, by installing a kernel
I compiled myself I fixed the problem - probably because I don't compile
APM support into my kernels.

It's not a major problem though, since the disks are all unmounted so
you shouldn't see any disk corruption arising from the oops.

 - Matt