Re: [gentoo-user] "Illegal instruction" error

[Alan McKinnon]

Apparently, though unproven, at 23:02 on Monday 11 October 2010, Mark Knecht 
did opine thusly:

> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 1:39 PM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com>
wrote:
> > Uh-oh.
> >
> > genlop started failing today with the mysterious error "Illegal
> > instruction", and it's consistent - every time. That's all the message,
> > nothing else:
> >
> > $ genlop -t portage
> > Illegal instruction
> >
> > Now emerge dbus-glib fails similarly:
> >
> > /bin/sh: line 21:  1084 Illegal instruction     /usr/bin/gtkdoc-rebase --
> > relative --dest-dir=/var/tmp/portage/dev-libs/dbus-glib-0.88/image/
> > --html- dir=${installdir}
> >
> >
> > I don't really know where to start looking.....
> > I just know Google is going to give me millions of useless hits with that
> > search, but I'll hope over to b.g.o. meanwhile and poke around unless
> > someone else has a better idea.
>
> Alan,
>    Consider (if possible - is this a desktop or some in service
> server?) powering down your machine, reseating your memory DIMMs,
> powering back up and if possible running memtest86 (assuming it's an
> x86 machine) and then seeing if the error goes away.
>
>    I've run into this a couple of times when memory problems have appeared.


Yes, that was it - memtest failed almost immediately. It's my notebook, with 
2 x 2G memory banks - either one in either position works fine. With both, 
memtest fails and always at the same place - step 48 of whatever.

So I guess it's the motherboard and I'll be calling Dell Support in the 
morning. Am I glad the company insists we buy 3 year next-day on-site 
corporate support for all hardware right now? You betcha!


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com