<quote who="Paul Reavis"> > It is a sid install, on newish hardware (athlon 1.4G) with a 2.4.14 > kernel. I updated to latest sid yesterday.
newish as in brand new? has the system run anything else before the problems occur with no problems ? > Could someone clue me in on this, or at least point me towards > other troubleshooting/diagnostic tools I could try? Thanks. while im by no means a kernel hacker what i see in the logs looks to be memory faults, if thats the case then ... - none of the components in the system are overclocked? - feel the sides of the system, is it warm? if its warm to the touch its usually too hot. - try a kernel stress test while not running X: -- little script-- #!/bin/bash while true do cd /usr/src/linux make clean ; make dep ; make -j bzImage echo "kernel compiled on `date`" >>/root/kernel-loop.log done --end script-- im doing that on a freebsd machine at this moment actually. i had some problems with crc errors, had the vendor "fix" the system, and compiled 1500 kernels on it over a period of a few days. i have another system that im testing now. Note you need gobs of memory to do a make -j. I did it on a redhat 7(this freebsd machine was redhat7 when i ordered it), and # of running processes spiked to about 220, memory usage went way up, load went to about 40. It is a P3-1Ghz with 512MB ram. If you have insuffient resources you can try make -j 5 or make -j 2. have you tried any other kernels? if your hardware permits i can't help but suggest using kernel 2.2 and see if it has the same problem(theres a lot of bugs like the one your experiencing in past 2.4.x kernels though i haven't seen many mentioned on the recent 2.4.10 and newer). all of my linux systems run 2.2, 2.4 is deemed to unstable for my use for another year. If you have enough ram, try turning off SWAP and see if the problem persists, i wouldn't reccomend X with no swap unless you have at least 256MB ram. crashing due to out of memory wouldn't make a good test :) maybe theres bad blocks on the disk in the swap partition causing problems .. What speed RAM do you have? my desktop at work used to lock up randomly too. The vendor swore that the ram was 133Mhz when infact it was about 127Mhz(according to a co worker..) I used the bios(Asus CUV4X) to force the ram to 100Mhz, and i have not had a crash in over a year. infact the machine has an uptime of 209 days currently. if all that fails to turn up anything the only other thing i can reccomend is reconfigure the system to a minimum amount of experimental software. that may mean taking out hardware that has beta/alpha drivers, and replacing it with more known solid hardware(video cards especially since your using X), try a 2.2 kernel on debian potato and see if the problem persists. another decent burn in test is [EMAIL PROTECTED] on new systems i used to run 10x copies of it at the same time, it would cause severe disk accesses(esp if the systems only had 128MB ram) for swap, memory and cpu usage would go through the roof. console would almost be unusable the system would be so slow..but if they emerged without a problem they were certified ok by me. memtest86 is good too, you mentioned you ran that already. how long did you run it for? in my testing it took about 12 hours to test 768MB of ram on a 1.3ghz athlon. when i had MB problems earlier in the year(i reccomend against using the Asus A7A266), i thought it could be ram, so i ran memtets86 for about 5 days straight and not a single problem. had about 12 passes on the memory during that time. if your still having problems include a detailed report on system configuration including hardware, software, driver versions, bios settings, disk partition settings etc. hth nate
