[maemo-developers] Continuous reboot problem with the N770 hacker edition

[From: Neal H. Walfield]

At Fri, 20 Apr 2007 18:26:42 +0200,
Rainer Dorsch <rdorsch at web.de> wrote:
> I used the N770 with the hacker edition of OS2007 heavily last week and it 
> broke:
> The device is rebooting constantly, even putting it into RD mode did not help 
> getting rid of this. The sequence is
> 1. blue boot progress bar
> 2. Nokia hands and sound
> 3. almost immidiately after the sound, a white stripe appears on the left of 
> the display. Looks like this is the Maemo menue bar. Then the screen becomes 
> white
> 4. after approx. 19 seconds the device reboots and continues with 1.
> 
> I interrupt the reboot cycles by removing the battery.

I'm using Gergale and this happens to me about once every week or two.
I had enough time after the device boots to run xterm and top.  The
problem was jffs2_gcd_mtd4 was taking 100% of the CPU and a fair
amount of memory.  This led me to suspect that the OOM killer was
killing an essential task and thereby causing the watchdog timer to
reset the device.  To prevent this, I simply disabled the watchdog
time.  Now when this happens, jffs2_gcd_mtd4 burns CPU (and thus is
unusable) but it is a few hours between resets.  After about day or
two, the device is happy again.

Neal