NOTE: ksymoops is useless on 2.6. Please use the Oops in its original format
(from dmesg, etc). Ignore any references in this or other docs to "decoding
-the Oops" or "running it through ksymoops". If you post an Oops fron 2.6 that
+the Oops" or "running it through ksymoops". If you post an Oops from 2.6 that
has been run through ksymoops, people will just tell you to repost it.
Quick Summary
(1) Hand copy the text from the screen and type it in after the machine
has restarted. Messy but it is the only option if you have not
- planned for a crash.
+ planned for a crash. Alternatively, you can take a picture of
+ the screen with a digital camera - not nice, but better than
+ nothing.
(2) Boot with a serial console (see Documentation/serial-console.txt),
run a null modem to a second machine and capture the output there
Tainted kernels:
Some oops reports contain the string 'Tainted: ' after the program
-counter, this indicates that the kernel has been tainted by some
-mechanism. The string is followed by a series of position sensitive
+counter. This indicates that the kernel has been tainted by some
+mechanism. The string is followed by a series of position-sensitive
characters, each representing a particular tainted value.
1: 'G' if all modules loaded have a GPL or compatible license, 'P' if
MODULE_LICENSE or with a MODULE_LICENSE that is not recognised by
insmod as GPL compatible are assumed to be proprietary.
- 2: 'F' if any module was force loaded by insmod -f, ' ' if all
+ 2: 'F' if any module was force loaded by "insmod -f", ' ' if all
modules were loaded normally.
3: 'S' if the oops occurred on an SMP kernel running on hardware that
- hasn't been certified as safe to run multiprocessor.
- Currently this occurs only on various Athlons that are not
- SMP capable.
+ hasn't been certified as safe to run multiprocessor.
+ Currently this occurs only on various Athlons that are not
+ SMP capable.
+
+ 4: 'R' if a module was force unloaded by "rmmod -f", ' ' if all
+ modules were unloaded normally.
+
+ 5: 'M' if any processor has reported a Machine Check Exception,
+ ' ' if no Machine Check Exceptions have occurred.
+
+ 6: 'B' if a page-release function has found a bad page reference or
+ some unexpected page flags.
The primary reason for the 'Tainted: ' string is to tell kernel
debuggers if this is a clean kernel or if anything unusual has
-occurred. Tainting is permanent, even if an offending module is
-unloading the tainted value remains to indicate that the kernel is not
+occurred. Tainting is permanent: even if an offending module is
+unloaded, the tainted value remains to indicate that the kernel is not
trustworthy.