August 2011 Archives

要約:
日常的に Vine マシンとして使っている MacBook Early 2008 の後釜として、MacBook Air Middle 2011 を購入。現時点で Vine が MBA 上でどの程度動くか動かないか、とりあえず現状を確認しました。で、安定するまで当分は OS X 上の VirtualBox に Vine 環境を移そうか、と考えています。

Bought a MacBook Air (Middle 2011) - 11inch, US Keyboard, 4GB Memory, 128GB SSD and Core i7 - to replace my MacBook (Early 2008) that has served me very hard as a Vine Linux development environment as a daily basis for a few years.

To be honest, I always have used my whity MacBook with Vine - Mac OS X is always there on the harddrive in a separated partition, but I seldom booted it up on my MacBook - maybe once or twice a year? Another OSX machine at home, an old PowerMac G4 MDD, is still there and serving me as a daily basis as well, to store my huge digital music contents (almost all in lossless format) on iTunes (still hundreds of CDs left to get ripped though), and as a scanning machine (connected to the old SCSI A3 flatbed scanner).

The first thing I did on my new toy was to play around the new OS for a while that amazed me a bit. This was the first time for me to play with the multi-touch trackpad and gestures. I felt Gestures and "Mission Control" are really great for portable computers with small screens like this MBA 11inch.

And the next thing I gonna do was, of course, to figure out how well this brand new machine is supported on Linux - I know there are so much to get done on the Linux kernel, the X thing, and some userland utilities, to run Linux on the MBA 2011 flawlessly, but I just thought it was worth checking out and playing around.

On my environment (VineSeed/Vine Linux 6 on MacBook Early 2008), the system always crashes with a kernel panic when trying to shut the system down like this:

panic occurred, switching back to text console
BUG: scheduling while atomic: swapper/0/0x10010000
Modules linked in: sit tunnel4 rfcomm sco bnep l2cap vboxnetadp vboxnetflt vboxdrv autofs4 sunrpc
ipv6 acpi_cpufreq freq_table mperf dm_mirror dm_region_hash dm_log dm_mod uinput snd_hda_codec_realtek
snd_hda_intel lib80211_crypt_tkip snd_hda_codec wl(P) snd_hwdep uvcvideo btusb snd_seq_dummy
snd_seq_oss snd_seq_midi_event snd_seq videodev bluetooth ohci1394 v4l1_compat snd_seq_device
applesmc snd_pcm_oss snd_pcm hwmon rfkill lib80211 ieee1394 led_class snd_timer snd firewire_ohci
soundcore firewire_core i2c_i801 snd_page_alloc sky2 input_polldev mbp_nvidia_bl pcspkr crc_itu_t
joydev iTCO_wdt iTCO_vendor_support appletouch processor battery thermal ac ata_generic pata_acpi
uhci_hcd ohci_hcd ehci_hcd i915 dkms_kms_helper drm i2c_algo_bit button i2c_core video output
[last unloaded: cpufreq_ondemand]
Pid: 0, comm: swapper Tainted: P       D     2.6.35-20vl6 #1
Call Trace:
[<c102d3a6>] __schedule_bug+0x1/0x56
[<c1359495>] schedule+0x83/0x4b9
[<f7d7b78e>] ? drm_crtc_helper_set_config+0x84/0x65b [drm_kms_helper]
[<c135999d>] _cond_resched+0x2e/0x47
[<c10c8b80>] __kmalloc+0xa8/0x145
[<f7d7b78e>] drm_crtc_helper_set_config+0x94/0x65b [drm_kms_helper]
[<c1005e37>] ?show_trace_log_lvl+0x39/0x43
[<f7d7aae8>] drm_fb_helper_force_kernel_mode+0x2b/0x5b [drm_kms_helper]
[<f7d7ab62>] drm_fb_helper_panic+0x17/0x1d [drm_kms_helper]
[<c104b6c3>] notifier_call_chain+0x14/0x16
[<c1359289>] atomic_notifier_call_chain+0x14/0x16
[<c1359289>] panic+0x73/0xbc
[<c1005c17>] oops_end+0x7a/0x88
[<c102088f>] no_context+0x115/0x11f
[<c102098a>] __bad_area_nosemaphore+0xf1/0xf9
[<c1020af0>] ? do_page_fault+0x0/0x2eb
[<c10209a4>] bad_area_nosemaphore+0x12/0x15
[<c1020c32>] d0_page_fault+0x142/0x2eb
[<c10080fd>] ?sched_clock+0x9/0xd
[<c104bfb3>] ?sched_clock_local+0x17/0x11e
[<c1020af0>] ?do_page_fault_0x0/0x2eb
[<c135b9b6>] error_code+0x66/0x6c
[<c104007b>] ? ignore_signals+0x21/0x27
[<c1020af0>] ?do_page_fault+0x0/0x2eb
[<f91a3e0d>] ?rtMpNotificationLinuxOnCurrentCPU+0xa/0x9d [vboxdrv]
[<f91a3a51>] rtmpLinuxWrapper+0x22/0x27 [vboxdrv]
[<c10572e7>] generic_smp_call_function_single_interrupt+0xa0/0xba
[<c1017e29>] smp_call_function_single_interrupt+0xa0/0xba
[<c135b546>] call_function_single_interuupt+0x2a/0x30
[<c104007b>] ? ignore_signals+0x21/0x27
[<f86fa1ea>] ? acpi_idle_enter_bm+0x24d/0x289 [processor]
[<c12b7475>] cpuidle_idle_call+0x73/0xce
[<c10023a3>] cpu_idle+0x4e/0x67
[<c1357280>] start_secondary+0x1a8/0x1ad

I'd been looking for the solution to the issue, and finally I found this was it:

• Ticket #9305: VBox modules randomly cause kernel panic on computer shutdown -> fixed as of 28-Jul 2011

The fix itself was very trivial:

--- src/VBox/Runtime/r0drv/linux/mpnotification-r0drv-linux.c	(revision 73209)
+++ src/VBox/Runtime/r0drv/linux/mpnotification-r0drv-linux.c	(revision 73210)
@@ -77,7 +77,7 @@
  * @param pvUser2           The notification event.
  * @remarks This can be invoked in interrupt context.
  */
-static void rtMpNotificationLinuxOnCurrentCpu(RTCPUID idCpu, void *pvUser1, void *pvUser2)
+static DECLCALLBACK(void) rtMpNotificationLinuxOnCurrentCpu(RTCPUID idCpu, void *pvUser1, void *pvUser2)
 {
     unsigned long ulNativeEvent = *(unsigned long *)pvUser2;
     NOREF(pvUser1);

Now the fix has been included on VirtualBox-4.1.0-2vl7 (VineSeed).

Same fix for Vine Linux 6 (more precisely, packages for VinePlus/6) will be uploaded as 4.1.0-2vl6 as well shortly.