AMD Opteron bug can cause random crashes in the kernel

Solution Unverified - Updated -

Issue

  • A bug in the AMD Opteron chip can cause kernel crashes which appear from analysis to look like a random jump/branch into code.
    • Quite often the target code being executed appears to have no connection to the inline code it should have been executing in.
    • In some cases, we appear to have re-entered a function that we were already executing earlier in the stack

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

    • Seen often when running as VMs on VMware ESXi5.5
    • At this time, this has only been reported on HP platform servers although there is no indication this is in anyway related to HP and therefore can affect any hardware platform

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (and other releases)

    • No cases have yet been reported/identified but this problem is a hardware issue and therefore it is possible it could affect any release

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