Panic: spin lock held too long when booting

[Kris Kennaway]

Mike Clarke wrote:
> On Tuesday 15 July 2008, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> 
>> Mike Clarke wrote:
>>> I'm getting frequent panics due to spin lock held too long when
>>> booting my recently built 6.3 system with an Athlon 4850e dual core
>>> processor on a Foxconn 6150M2MA motherboard (GeForce 6150 and
>>> nForce 430 chipsets).
> 
> [snip]
> 
>> You should add options WITNESS also and this will probably generate
>> additional debugging and/or a panic before the error occurs.
> 
> OK, done that. The first reboot came up OK, sods law being what it is 
> the next few boots will be clean and I'll have to wait a while for 
> results from the next panic but in the meantime here's the messages 
> generated by WITNESS for the clean boot:
> 
> curlew:/home/mike% grep WITNESS /var/run/dmesg.boot
> WARNING: WITNESS option enabled, expect reduced performance.
> WITNESS: spin lock scrlock not in order list
> WITNESS: spin lock intrcnt not in order list
> WITNESS: spin lock ctl.rm_mtx not in order list
> WITNESS: spin lock dev.rm_mtx not in order list
> 
> ... do they give any clues?
> 

Not really, they are basically just advisory in this context (and fixed 
in later releases AFAIK).

Unfortunately WITNESS can drastically change timing of events which can 
mask this kind of problem.  If you can afford it, keep trying with it 
enabled for a while.

Kris