Memory corruption starting in i915 code, in 3.2-rc5

[Alex Villací­s Lasso]

El 12/12/11 11:41, Keith Packard escribió:
> On Mon, 12 Dec 2011 09:51:19 -0500, Alex Villací­s Lasso<a_villacis at palosanto.com>  wrote:
>
>> Ran kernel with reverted patch for 6 hours without issues so far. Will
>> keep testing after work (issue happens with my home machine).
> Thanks much. Let me know if it's still stable this evening; I can send a
> revert along if you don't find any problems.
>
I just had a severe problem, but I am not sure if the patch (or its revert) is at fault.

I was running 3.2-rc5 at home, for an hour or so, when suddenly I could not launch any programs. I tried switching to the text console, but the login program restarted itself after typing "root", without waiting for the password. I then tried to reboot, 
but all of the installed kernels (even the stock Fedora ones) issued a kernel panic very early in the boot sequence, mentioning an attempt to kill init. By using a bootable USB stick, I could check the logs, which showed many segfaults at 
/lib64/ld-2.14.90.so . Even though running fsck -f on my / and /boot partitions (both ext4) showed no errors besides an unclean shutdown, the kernel panics on boot persisted. I eventually reinstalled the system from scratch, and kept my /home partition so 
that no important data was lost. I am still in the process of restoring my package list to the state before the crash.

Maybe the list corruption I experienced earlier was secondary damage, which now spread somewhere else and corrupted system files, but I do not have enough data to check this.