"Merlin Moncure" <mmoncure@gmail.com> writes: > On friday we upgraded a critical backend server to postgresql 8.2 > running on fedora core 4.
Umm ... why that particular choice of OS? Red Hat dropped update support for FC4 some time ago, and AFAIK the Fedora Legacy project is not getting things done. How old is the kernel you're using?
> At this juncture we are going to downgrade the postmaster back to 8.1 > and see if that fixes the panics.
Even assuming that Postgres is related to the panics, I don't think you will find anyone maintaining that a kernel panic is not the kernel's problem. If an application *is* able to provoke a kernel panic, the standard description of the problem would be "critical kernel security flaw".
I vaguely remember running into spinlock problems with FC4 and it wasn't due to PostgreSQL. We didn't have database running on FC4.
If you are running a critical server you should switch to atleast CentOS.