[Pkg-kbd-devel] chvt crashes the whole system - pleas help to investiage the error

[Christian Gogolin]

Hallo ,

for about 7 weeks I am suffering from crashes under Debian Lenny on my 
Samsung X20 notebook.

The crashes occur when the program "chvt" is used to witch between 
virtual terminals.

This is especially annoying because "chvt" is called during every 
suspend/resum, hibernate and shutdown process, thus these crashes render 
the system almost unusable.

The system does not crash always, but fairly often.
Everything else works flawless.

When the system crashes two monochrome pixel patterns are displayed by 
turns with a frequency of about 1/2 second. The majority of such a 
pattern is black with brighter, noisy bunches with a grating of 
approximately the size of a character on the tty's. The screen 
resolution seams to be 640x480 at that time.
Directly after the crash the hard disk LED glows, but after a short time 
it turns off and the hard drive spins down.
The notebook does not respond to anything, no response to keyboard (not 
even the keyboard LEDs), no ping answers - nothing.

After a hard reset upon boot the machine complains about not unmounted 
ext3 partitions but has (for gods sake) always recovered just fine.

I experienced crashes with both the 2.6.18 and 2.6.21 stock kernels an 
several custom made 2.6.21 kernels both worked fine before.

A hardware Problem can be excluded. I checked the memory and hard disk 
extensively and the systems works flawless even under high stress. 
Moreover I found an other user in a German Debian community 
(http://www.debianforum.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=89507) experiencing the 
same problem on the same notebook.

As far as I can tell the log-files unfortunately do not contain any 
useful information.

I tried to trace the crash via "strace" but the system crashes before 
the trace is written to disk.

I also tried to use the "chvt" program that is provided by the package 
"console-tools" and tried to use older versions of the packages 
"console-tools","console-common","kbd","lsb-base" in a lot of 
combinations, but the problem persists.

I feel like I do not have enough information to file a bug report but on 
the other hand don't know how I could provide you with more infos.

Do you have any suggestions what could cause the Problem oder what I can 
do to further investigate the problem?

Any hint would be greatly appreciated, I am really desperate ...

Thank you for taking the time to read all this!


kind regards

Christian Gogolin

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
   APT prefers testing
   APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.21cg08
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
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