Gentoo Archives: gentoo-amd64

From: Peter Hoff <petehoff@×××××××.net>
To: gentoo-amd64@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-amd64] Gentoo crashing?
Date: Tue, 15 May 2007 13:28:51
Message-Id: 68501.65143.qm@web83307.mail.sp1.yahoo.com
1 ----- Original Message ----
2 From: Peter Davoust <worldgnat@×××××.com>
3 To: gentoo-amd64@l.g.o
4 Sent: Monday, May 14, 2007 7:11:20 PM
5 Subject: Re: [gentoo-amd64] Gentoo crashing?
6
7 I know it doesn't actually burn the cpu, but I'd rather not cook any components if I don't have to. From what I know of torture tests, they run the cpu so hot it starts making computational errors, am I right? It still makes me nervous. I was hoping to be able to fix the issue just by recompiling my kernel, but no such luck. I'll mess with it some more and see what I can do. Can you give me any advice as to what I should to to a) not violate my warrantee and b) avoid killing my computer as much as possible? Could it just be something with my Gentoo install? I guess that's a stupid question; I've had this problem on an older computer, but it was a Desktop and it was much easier to swap components without messing up my warrantee. So if it were a hardware problem, wouldn't you think that suse
8 10.2 would have run into it as well? I used to run 10.2 (used to as in 3 days ago) for hours on end without any problems at all. I agree that Gentoo can run the computer harder, but that doesn't quite click.
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10 -Peter
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15 You're being silly. Software torture tests are not going to kill your hardware. Just run them and see what you get. Memtest will give you the address where the error occured, and I've always been able to determine which stick was bad from that, using a little deductive reasoning (I usually verify by testing the sticks alone, but so far I've not been wrong).
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17 As for voiding your warranty, memory and the hard drive are typically considered user-servicable parts. In fact, most of the time if either of those are the problem they'll just send you the parts and you'll have to replace them yourself anyway.
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19 More on torturing hardware: really, the only component that's at all vulnerable to this is the hard drive, simply because it's a mechanical device, but it will take an absurdly long time to do any actual damage. I used to test hard drives for video servers (think Tivo, but starting at $100k). We tried a wide variety of drive testing suites, but it turned out none of them ran the drives harder than our normal application. A surprising number of the oldest version of our product are still running, on the original drives, after over 10 years, in situations that are very demanding (like serving multiple channels for DirecTV). So, really, stop being so paranoid about software torture tests. It is a complete myth that you can ruin your hardware by running them.

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Re: [gentoo-amd64] Gentoo crashing? Peter Davoust <worldgnat@×××××.com>