RHEL: Random crashes and Vmcore generation?

Solution In Progress - Updated -

Issue

  • This can also happen on bare metal machines with faulty hardware.
  • Often the machine crashes with different backtraces.
  • A RHEL virtual machine running on VMware got crashed and vmcore got created.
  • Need to check why the system got crashed.
  • Panic backtrace as below. This could vary considerably. Following is only an example where a bad RIP (instruction pointer) is passed in. Other registers could also be corrupted it does not always manifest as a bad RIP. In that case check whether underlying structures in memory are in tact.
crash> bt
PID: 7360   TASK: ffff88131cc34040  CPU: 20  COMMAND: "programname"
 #0 [ffff8809e1e83920] machine_kexec at ffffffff8103fd6b
 #1 [ffff8809e1e83980] crash_kexec at ffffffff810d1f02
 #2 [ffff8809e1e83a50] oops_end at ffffffff8154f070
 #3 [ffff8809e1e83a80] no_context at ffffffff8105186b
 #4 [ffff8809e1e83ad0] __bad_area_nosemaphore at ffffffff81051af5
 #5 [ffff8809e1e83b20] bad_area_nosemaphore at ffffffff81051bc3
 #6 [ffff8809e1e83b30] __do_page_fault at ffffffff810522dc
 #7 [ffff8809e1e83c50] do_page_fault at ffffffff81550ffe
 #8 [ffff8809e1e83c80] page_fault at ffffffff8154e2f5
 #9 [ffff8809e1e83d08] vmxnet3_rq_rx_complete at ffffffffa017842e [vmxnet3]
#10 [ffff8809e1e83e18] vmxnet3_poll_rx_only at ffffffffa0178f43 [vmxnet3]
#11 [ffff8809e1e83e58] net_rx_action at ffffffff81480fa3
#12 [ffff8809e1e83eb8] __do_softirq at ffffffff81085335
#13 [ffff8809e1e83f38] call_softirq at ffffffff8100c38c
#14 [ffff8809e1e83f50] do_softirq at ffffffff8100fc95
#15 [ffff8809e1e83f70] irq_exit at ffffffff810851c5
#16 [ffff8809e1e83f80] do_IRQ at ffffffff81554bc5
--- <IRQ stack> ---

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux
  • VMware hypervisor
  • Bare metal machines

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