[CentOS] Kernel panic, CentOS 7.1503 fully updated, with executing gkrellm.

Thu Apr 2 14:33:06 UTC 2015
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

On 04/02/2015 07:29 AM, Marcelo Ricardo Leitner wrote:
> If it's that easy to reproduce, please grab the panic message or 
> generate a vmcore through crashdump and report it at 
> bugzilla.redhat.com against kernel component.
>

Thanks for the pointer with some details.  I see that I have a bit to 
learn.  The first thing I need to do is reproduce it on other hardware.

I will say that I have experienced the same bug twice, but the first 
time I thought it was a botched yum update with CR enabled (and me 
having several packages installed from a mixed set of repos as well as 
some hand-built RPMs in there), and that was with / on ext4. This 
happened with / on xfs and an almost pristine install of the 20150228 
rolling ISO updated to 1503.  I use gkrellm as a quick visual dashboard 
of system load, and it is useful in that context. I also have it in my 
startup applications, so the kp happens immediately after logging in.  
(Both times with the same /home on ext4 over LUKS.)  The second time, 
nautilus would not start on a reboot/re-login due to corruption of one 
of its libraries (found in the 'tracker' package).  So I am a bit loath 
to hit this one again on my main machine, as I just don't have time this 
week for another reinstall.

> You may be using an EPEL application but kernel shouldn't be panicking 
> like that, specially if you're running it as an user.
>
Yeah, if gkrellm (run as a non-privileged user) can panic the kernel, a 
non-gui app hitting the same bits can too (unless it's related to the 
video card's driver).  Pairing a non-privileged userland kp witha a 
remote arbitrary code execution bug could be nasty.  That's why I still 
hope it's local to my machine.  But now to try to reproduce on other 
hardware.  (for reference, hardware on which I saw the bug is a Dell 
Precision M6500 with a Core i7-740QM and an AMD/ATI Firepro 7820M video, 
with / on a Samsung PM830 SSD)