Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 1 Jul 1999 07:55:26 -0400 (EDT) | From | "Steven N. Hirsch" <> | Subject | Re: 2.2.10 oops (finally, something I can report!) |
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On Wed, 30 Jun 1999, Nate Eldredge wrote:
> Linus wrote: > > > > The thing that does NOT make sense is the cause of the oops itself, > > though. > > > > The oops happens on > > > > c017b651 pushl %ebx > > > > and %esp = c3941e80. > > > > And quite frankly, there's not a way in h*ll that that instruction could > > raise the exception in question. But it does. > > > > I would _strongly_ suspect one of two things: > > - bad CPU. > > - bad cache or RAM timings. > > I had a Cyrix CPU some time back that had a *very* similar problem. I > believe it was running 2.0.36. Anyway, it worked absolutely fine, until > one day I built EGCS. This binary would, about 1/3 of the time, crash. > Poking around with a debugger showed that the instruction on which it > crashed was an access to a perfectly valid address (according to > /proc/xx/maps). Swapping in a different CPU (I think it was an Intel > Pentium) fixed it. ISTR it also could be fixed by turning off the L1 > cache or something equally unacceptable performance-wise.
I'll provide another data point on this issue. For about two years, my Cyrix P150+ box would crash 1 out of 3 times during kernel builds with spurious signal 11's. No rhyme or reason - the location was random and non-deterministic.
Finally, after a suggestion from Alan Cox, I picked up a Pentium 166 and replaced the CPU. Haven't seen so much as a hiccup from the box since then (about 8 months now).
This is almost certainly a hardware problem.
Steve
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