I was running 3.7.1 kernel quite fine for a while but I realized that it is slow and that I should go and drop useless kernel drivers from my kernel. I have a SandyBridge-based laptop and I found that I gain speed while setting CONFIG_NO_HZ=y, CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE=y, removing multicore scheduler, asking configurator set set maximum amount of CPUs for my system (and not blindly specifying 4 for my dual-core i7 processor). Further I get faster system while removing IOMMU and DMA redirects while it still emulates NUMA. And, I switched away from CFQ scheduler to deadline and from SLAB to SLUB. Finally, to make sure my CPU cores do not go back and forth between C0 and C7 states and shutdown dynamically the 2 hyperthreaded cores. So I have really only two, physical cores accessible. With performance CPU governor I have 1/2 of context switches and both cores can be satured by whatever jobs (kernel compile or some computational jobs). It was not possible to get the CPU running at turbo speed for a long while as it always went down time to time. With ondemand governor I had cores in C7 for 50-70% of the time, that was a bit better with performance governor but having the two hyperthreaded cores disabled reduced the context switches by half, rescheduling interrupts went down by several orders of magnitute. So it is crunching at max turbo speed on both cores, temp about 80 oC. I think none of the changes relates to the kernel crash directly but I had not a single crash with 3.7.1 for few weeks. After the tweaks I had 3-4 crashes this afternoon. The system always locked up so I could not see anything. Luckily, be it actually the same crash or not, now my X11 screen was dropped and to my framebuffer console and I got to see a kernel stacktrace. Here is the first, fished out from /var/log/messages upon next bootup: Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251110] general protection fault: 0000 [#1] SMP Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251135] Modules linked in: i915 fbcon bitblit cfbfillrect softcursor cfbimgblt i2c_algo_bit font cfbcopyarea drm_kms_helper drm fb iwldvm iwlwifi fbdev sata_sil24 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251197] CPU 1 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251206] Pid: 795, comm: kswapd0 Not tainted 3.7.1-default #22 Dell Inc. Vostro 3550/ Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251229] RIP: 0010:[] [] mutex_trylock+0xb/0x26 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251257] RSP: 0018:ffff88040d25bbb8 EFLAGS: 00010246 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251273] RAX: 0000000000000001 RBX: ffff88040bfdc000 RCX: ffff88040d25bce8 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251293] RDX: 0000000000000000 RSI: 0000000000000000 RDI: 0720072007200728 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251313] RBP: ffff88040d25bbb8 R08: dead000000200200 R09: dead000000100100 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251333] R10: ffff88040d25bc38 R11: ffff8804078acec0 R12: ffff88040bfdc001 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251354] R13: ffffea0010137440 R14: 0720072007200728 R15: 0000000000000001 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251374] FS: 0000000000000000(0000) GS:ffff88041fa80000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251396] CS: 0010 DS: 0000 ES: 0000 CR0: 0000000080050033 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251413] CR2: 00002b876c545978 CR3: 00000000018f6000 CR4: 00000000000407e0 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251432] DR0: 0000000000000000 DR1: 0000000000000000 DR2: 0000000000000000 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251452] DR3: 0000000000000000 DR6: 00000000ffff0ff0 DR7: 0000000000000400 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251472] Process kswapd0 (pid: 795, threadinfo ffff88040d25a000, task ffff88040d07ce30) Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251494] Stack: Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251501] ffff88040d25bbe8 ffffffff810f6994 ffffea0010137440 0000000000000000 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251527] ffff88040d25bde8 ffff88041fddad00 ffff88040d25bc58 ffffffff810f6b9e Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251551] 0000000000000000 ffff8804046d2dc0 00000000810dee97 ffff88040d25bce8 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251576] Call Trace: Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251587] [] page_lock_anon_vma+0x40/0xaf Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251605] [] page_referenced+0x78/0x1b7 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251623] [] shrink_active_list+0x209/0x305 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251641] [] kswapd+0x3fe/0x8ea Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251658] [] ? wake_up_bit+0x25/0x25 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251675] [] ? try_to_free_pages+0x8c/0x8c Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251692] [] kthread+0x90/0x98 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251707] [] ? kthread_freezable_should_stop+0x3c/0x3c Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251727] [] ret_from_fork+0x7c/0xb0 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251743] [] ? kthread_freezable_should_stop+0x3c/0x3c Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251762] Code: 8d 53 08 c7 03 01 00 00 00 48 39 d0 74 09 48 8b 78 10 e8 a0 79 ac ff 66 83 43 04 01 5a 5b c9 c3 55 b8 01 00 00 00 48 89 e5 31 d2 0f b1 17 ff c8 75 0f 65 48 8b 04 25 00 b8 00 00 b2 01 48 89 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251898] RIP [] mutex_trylock+0xb/0x26 Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.251916] RSP Jan 6 22:37:29 vostro kernel: [ 7663.471083] ---[ end trace 15db67145b2c838a ]--- Jan 6 22:37:39 vostro kernel: [ 7672.954999] SysRq : Emergency Sync It seemed the kernel was still running, disk was doing some work and CPU fan was changing its speed. I then pressed alt+sysrq+i and got (retyped from a camera picture which is attached as this one was not in /var/log/messages): lock_anon_vma_root.clone unlink_anon_vmas free_pgtables exit_mmap mmput exit_mm do_exit ? recalc_sigpending_tsk do_group_exit get_signal_to_deliver do_signal ? timespec_add_safe ? __fput do_notify_resume int_signal But the system was dead, I had to turn off the power. Any clues? What kernel .config item should I enable/disable to avoid it in the future? ;-) Thank you, Martin