On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 10:50:46AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Friday 12 February 2010 10:54:53 Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> > Hi, Gentoo,

> > My new Gentoo box has become unusably unstable.

> > The first sign was when the compiler threw a segfault whilst emerging
> > the xfce window manager. I "solved" this by emerging Openbox
> > instead.

> > Then I got another compiler segfault whilst emerging firefox (yes, I
> > know there's a binary for this).



> everything you mention below is indicative of failing hardware,
> especially RAM closely followed by PSU.

> Swap them out with known good items and test thoroughly *before* doing
> anything else.

I hope you're not right here. ;-) The hardware is spanking brand new;
so new, in fact, that it's still gleaming.

Are there any handy utility programs around to test RAM exhaustively?

[ .... ]

> --
> alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

Hi, Alan,

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 10:50:46AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Friday 12 February 2010 10:54:53 Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> > Hi, Gentoo,

> > My new Gentoo box has become unusably unstable.

> > The first sign was when the compiler threw a segfault whilst emerging
> > the xfce window manager. I "solved" this by emerging Openbox instead.

> > Then I got another compiler segfault whilst emerging firefox (yes, I
> > know there's a binary for this).



> everything you mention below is indicative of failing hardware, especially RAM
> closely followed by PSU.

Yes, you're right. :-(

When I run memtest86 from the gentoo boot disk, it signals millions of
failures in b11 of 32 bit words.

I'll try unplugging and replugging these.

Thanks for the tip.

> alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

Hi, Volker,

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 01:56:48PM +0100, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:

> you can try upping the voltage of the ram by 0.05V. I had a stick that
> threw errors unless I gave it a bit more. After that the system was
> stable and none of the memtesting apps found any errors.

Tried that with the voltage everywhere from 1.5v to 1.6v in 0.02v steps.
It didn't help. It turns out, one of the RAM sticks was kaputt.

--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).