bug#43143: Building iwd on armhf triggers kernel panic

[Mark H Weaver]

Hi Vagrant,

Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org> writes:

> On 2020-08-31, Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
>> On 2020-08-31, Mark H. Weaver wrote:
>>> Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org> writes:
>>>> I've been getting kernel panics when i try to build iwd, a dependency of
>>>> network-manager.
>>>
>>> Which kernel package variant(s) and version(s) have you seen panic when
>>> building iwd?  What hardware?
>>
>> The hardware is veryron-speedy (a.k.a. asus chromebook c201p), with a
>> rockchip rk3288 CPU and 4GB of ram; I might be able to test on
>> additional hardware at some point (I've got a pretty old guix install on
>> a novena, but don't recall if it was in good working order last time it
>> booted).

That message went on to say the following, although you omitted it here:

>> linux-libre-arm-generic@5.4 5.4.57, and presumably older versions as
>> well, as I had commits in my local guix from mid June disabling iwd on
>> network-manager.

> Ok, managed to build iwd just fine on a novena imx6 platform, running
> armhf on "linux-libre" 5.4.25 (haven't yet finished upgrading the
> system).
>
> So it appears to potentially be hardware-specific? The imx6 vs. rk3288
> are pretty different platforms;

Based on what you wrote, it sounds like it could either be a
hardware-specific problem, or else a kernel-configuration-specific
problem, since you used radically different kernel configurations in
these two cases.

If I understand correctly, 'linux-libre-arm-generic@5.4' is the variant
that panicked on an rk3288, whereas the 'linux-libre@5.4' variant with
our hand-crafted default configuration worked on an imx6.

I don't know whether it's possible to use precisely the same kernel
configuration on these two systems.  Anyway, it would be helpful to
retry the 'iwd' build on these two devices with kernel versions and
configurations that are identical except for a minimal set of required
differences.  That would help us narrow down the set of possible causes
for this kernel panic.

What do you think?

      Thanks,
        Mark