[Asus Transformer TF700] brad0112358:
An update in case anyone is interested:

I haven't learned anything about the tegra specific issues with chroot, but I do think I understand where at least half of the random android application crashes I experience are coming from.

I have been running dmesg after any android application crashes and I noticed that in over half of the cases, the kernel oops at the end of this post was reported. The oops report indicates that the nvidia driver was attempting to allocate a 64K block of physical memory. Examining nvhost_job.c in the kernel source makes it clear that the nvidia driver is poorly written with respect to dynamic allocation of large blocks of physical memory in order to satisfy dynamic application gl operations. A bit of research turned up that this bug has been reported previously way back in March on transformerforums.com. I'm not sure why it seems to have never been discussed here and I'm not sure why it has taken ASUS and Nvidia so long to fix it.

I believe this rather nasty and stupid bug explains many of the android application crashes I and others have seen, including google play, google maps (this one tends to persist until you reboot), various vnc viewers, etc. Note that this bug is more likely to be triggered the longer we go without a reboot. And stressing the system with respect to memory use, for example, by performing lots of output to the transformer's slow storage, or running lots of programs inside a chroot triggers the bug sooner.

The good news is I checked the recently available TF300 Jelly Bean kernel source on the ASUS site and was happy to see that the driver has been reworked to use virtual memory for this purpose which should solve this class of application crashes. I assume the same fix will be in JB for the TF700 when it is released.

I wish the root cause of the other Tegra specific problems I see inside the Ubuntu chroot including the compiler bus errors were as easy to debug.

--Brad

<4>[162943.445514] ogle.android.gm: page allocation failure. order:4, mode:0xd0

<4>[162943.445656] [<c004f4d0>] (unwind_backtrace+0x0/0x12c) from [<c00e86e4>] (__alloc_pages_nodemask+0x5f4/0x658)

<4>[162943.445778] [<c00e86e4>] (__alloc_pages_nodemask+0x5f4/0x658) from [<c010cddc>] (cache_alloc_refill+0x2c0/0x52c)

<4>[162943.445915] [<c010cddc>] (cache_alloc_refill+0x2c0/0x52c) from [<c010d0e0>] (__kmalloc+0x98/0xe0)

<4>[162943.446031] [<c010d0e0>] (__kmalloc+0x98/0xe0) from [<c024a874>] (nvhost_job_realloc+0x4c/0x134)

<4>[162943.446221] [<c024a874>] (nvhost_job_realloc+0x4c/0x134) from [<c024b494>] (set_submit+0x58/0x90)

<4>[162943.446336] [<c024b494>] (set_submit+0x58/0x90) from [<c024b714>] (nvhost_channelctl+0x248/0x44c)

<4>[162943.446406] [<c024b714>] (nvhost_channelctl+0x248/0x44c) from [<c011efb8>] (do_vfs_ioctl+0x500/0x57c)

<4>[162943.446544] [<c011efb8>] (do_vfs_ioctl+0x500/0x57c) from [<c011f068>] (sys_ioctl+0x34/0x54)

<4>[162943.446665] [<c011f068>] (sys_ioctl+0x34/0x54) from [<c00495c0>] (ret_fast_syscall+0x0/0x30)

<4>[162943.446801] Mem-info:

<4>[162943.446858] Normal per-cpu:

<4>[162943.446915] CPU 0: hi: 186, btch: 31 usd: 1

<4>[162943.447036] HighMem per-cpu:

<4>[162943.447094] CPU 0: hi: 186, btch: 31 usd: 0

<4>[162943.447180] active_anon:91412 inactive_anon:172 isolated_anon:0

<4>[162943.447184] active_file:31694 inactive_file:44876 isolated_file:32

<4>[162943.447187] unevictable:227 dirty:8 writeback:0 unstable:0

<4>[162943.447190] free:16204 slab_reclaimable:2875 slab_unreclaimable:3047

<4>[162943.447193] mapped:18781 shmem:208 pagetables:2670 bounce:0

<4>[162943.447635] Normal free:62760kB min:3224kB low:4028kB high:4836kB active_anon:172696kB inactive_anon:112kB active_file:82056kB inactive_file:109704kB unevictable:0kB isolated(anon):0kB isolated(file):128kB present:650240kB mlocked:0kB dirty:32kB writeback:0kB mapped:37376kB shmem:180kB slab_reclaimable:11500kB slab_unreclaimable:12188kB kernel_stack:7312kB pagetables:10680kB unstable:0kB bounce:0kB writeback_tmp:0kB pages_scanned:0 all_unreclaimable? no

<4>[162943.448281] lowmem_reserve[]: 0 2880 2880

<4>[162943.448608] HighMem free:2056kB min:360kB low:816kB high:1272kB active_anon:192952kB inactive_anon:576kB active_file:44720kB inactive_file:69800kB unevictable:908kB isolated(anon):0kB isolated(file):0kB present:368656kB mlocked:0kB dirty:0kB writeback:0kB mapped:37748kB shmem:652kB slab_reclaimable:0kB slab_unreclaimable:0kB kernel_stack:0kB pagetables:0kB unstable:0kB bounce:0kB writeback_tmp:0kB pages_scanned:0 all_unreclaimable? no

<4>[162943.450980] lowmem_reserve[]: 0 0 0

<4>[162943.451323] Normal: 3378*4kB 4302*8kB 901*16kB 40*32kB 2*64kB 0*128kB 0*256kB 0*512kB 0*1024kB 0*2048kB 0*4096kB = 63752kB

<4>[162943.452059] HighMem: 256*4kB 35*8kB 27*16kB 6*32kB 0*64kB 1*128kB 0*256kB 0*512kB 0*1024kB 0*2048kB 0*4096kB = 2056kB

<4>[162943.452864] 76613 total pagecache pages

<4>[162943.452924] 0 pages in swap cache

<4>[162943.452983] Swap cache stats: add 0, delete 0, find 0/0

<4>[162943.453091] Free swap = 0kB

<4>[162943.453149] Total swap = 0kB

<4>[162943.498866] 261632 pages of RAM

<4>[162943.498982] 17680 free pages

<4>[162943.499041] 11846 reserved pages

<4>[162943.499118] 5922 slab pages

<4>[162943.500755] 258372 pages shared

<4>[162943.500869] 0 pages swap cached