Gentoo Archives: gentoo-amd64

From: Peter Humphrey <prh@××××××××××.uk>
To: gentoo-amd64@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Incipient hardware failure?
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 09:43:50
Message-Id: 42D4E207.80408@gotadsl.co.uk
1 Jani Averbach wrote:
2
3 >Another good way to test your memory is this little script:
4 >http://people.redhat.com/dledford/memtest.html
5 >
6 >
7
8 Well, what a week! I ran two copies of this useful script, one on each
9 physical disk [1], while simultaneously running BOINC clients at nice=19
10 to fill in the CPU gaps. Sometimes I would try an emerge -e world
11 instead of one of the memtest scripts; I did that because I wasn't sure
12 I'd cleaned up the tool-chain since installing, so I emerged
13 linux-headers, glibc, binutils and gcc and then -e world.
14
15 I still kept getting segmentation faults, and other compilation errors
16 occurred in a few packages such as xorg-x11. Each segmentation fault
17 disappeared on running emerge --resume, as expected. Eventually I
18 remembered revdep-rebuild; running that cured the xorg-x11 problem (I
19 forget which library was rebuilt). The memtest script passed every time
20 - and the disk temperatures rose anything up to 20 C to over 50 C, which
21 illustrates the amount of extra work they were doing.
22
23 So I have a box that passes all tests except one: compiling programs.
24 Looks like I'll just have to wait for a harder fault to appear. Thanks
25 to all who've offered suggestions.
26
27 --
28 Rgds
29 Peter Humphrey
30 Linux Counter 5290, Aug 93.
31
32
33 [1] I did notice one minor wrinkle. The two copies started in series, so
34 one was always following the other with its requests for disk transfers,
35 at least at first, and so fell steadily behind. But by specifying, say,
36 40 passes, I saw that the two instances eventually drifted well out of
37 sync; I deduce therefore that the occurrence of interrupts will have
38 been random for all practical purposes. Secondly, I used a kernel
39 without swap because I thought it would make no difference; the disks
40 were being stressed equally anyway. Thirdly, I ran some tests from
41 xterms, and others from the console without X running.
42
43 --
44 gentoo-amd64@g.o mailing list