Comment 11 for bug 123223

In the past week I've had this same error message twice, while using Firefox.

The first time, Firefox froze, then gnome-panel crashed, then Compiz crashed. I killed X with Control-Alt-Delete. The virtual terminals printed information which looks like the same sort of thing ("call trace", libraries and what look like memory addresses) as in the original bug report. Finally, I had a kernel panic message... sorry I can't remember it precisely, but it was something like "Kernel Panic: Sync failed - tried to kill init!".

The same problem happened again with me just now. Firefox froze. I force-quit it straight away, but the Compiz animation froze half-way through. X froze as well, but I was able to force an emergency sync before I rebooted. The only error message printed to the kernel log was "Feb 16 22:01:24 chris-desktop kernel: [15332.295773] Eeek! page_mapcount(page) went negative! (-1)". That is also the only error printed to the syslog. I have just found the messages from the first time it happened 2 days ago; these are attached.

I know that the first time I was running Firefox and Pidgin. The second time I know I was running Firefox and Kdenlive, which had been killing the X server earlier. I might have been running Kdenlive the first time as well, and I might've been running Pidgin the second time.

The major oddity of my system is that I don't have any swap, but it has been running fine for 1.5 months since I built it. It passed Memtest86 a month ago. The only hardware or software change I have made recently is that I set up Gnome so that when I press the power button on my tower, it shuts down (rather than the default action of "ask").

Running Ubuntu Gutsy, with kernel 2.6.22-14.46 generic on 32-bit x86 with SMP in use.