Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Random reboots. Where to start?

[Peter Humphrey]

On Tuesday 01 March 2011 23:14:12 Mick wrote:

> Ha! I remember on an old machine when in WinXP would rarely if ever
> crash, while in Gentoo would crash every time.

My machine is only about a year old, built by a specialist builder of high-
performance systems, so it shouldn't be experiencing hardware failures.

> Different OS' use memory differently.

Indeed they do. My experience is the converse of yours: Gentoo does not 
hang, while Fedora and Mandriva do. It's not a problem with a particular 
area of the disks, as I've installed them both in different partitions and 
got the same result. I assume that some kernel options don't suit my 
motherboard. Don't all laugh, but it's an Asus P7P55D.

> After a year or so though the WinXP installation eventually corrupted
> itself irreparably, while Gentoo (on reiserfs) soldiered on. Eventually, I
> bought new memory modules and there were no more crashes.

Maybe I need to replace the memory. That's a bit drastic though when I 
haven't actually proved it faulty.

> memtest 86+ showed no errors, so I didn't know what to blame for all
> these crashes.

It's well known that test programs can't stress a computer the way real life 
does. It was true of Ferranti Argus 500 systems in 1974, and I'm sure it's 
still true today.

> After close observation I discovered that the machine would crash the
> moment it tried to start swapping.

Interesting. As far as I can tell though this box doesn't swap often - it 
can go weeks without doing so. As I said the other day, my 4GB is enough to 
contain the work I usually do.

> This would typically happen in the middle of an emerge, which was rather
> annoying, and/or when updatedb was running.

At least you could re-run an aborted emerge; when my box hangs it just stops 
responding to keyboard and mouse, and the network interface stops receiving 
packets so I can't ssh in from another box to shut it down neatly. It's BRS 
time.

-- 
Rgds
Peter