Memtest problem / my kernel question

[Sean]

My money is still on a bad ram stick. It is usually the cause of really
wanky unpredictable failures. (even across platforms!) It seriosuly the
same thing that happened to me on both the X86 and Sparc Linux installs
with bad ram sticks.

Software memory testers suck and don't necessarily catch the error
correctly right away. On the X86 box I just guessed. On the Mac it caught
it the first time, then i tried again and let it run 100 reps and it didnt
find anything, I quit and reran it and it caught it. On the Sparc, I
put the Solaris install disk in and not only did it catch the error but it
wouldnt let me install. *bows and worships Sun for catching it and Memoryx
cause they replaced it with no hassles*




On Mon, 18 Sep 2000, Torgo Jr wrote:

> On the machine which I've reported some strange problems 
> before:  I ran "memtest 50000000", and the output is mostly 
> just lines like:
> 
> VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for kswapd
> 
> The "kswapd" is also "rpc.nfsd" or "memtest" in a few 
> places, but mostly "kswapd".  Like a good little hacker 
> (wannabe) I figured that this is a kernel message and
> found this message in /usr/src/linux/mm/vmscan.c.  Fine, 
> but I'm no kernel guru, so the source doesn't make 
> too much sense.  The machine is a K6-2 300 Mhz, 128M 
> ram, using a stock Debian 2.2.17(pre) kernel.  For 
> some reason I couldn't compile the kernel source a few 
> weeks ago.  Since 2.2.17 is now released, I'll try this 
> soon.
> 
> But.... given that my kernel is currently a "pre", could 
> the "pre"-ness be giving me my occasional strange 
> problems?  Those problems being after the machine has 
> been up for a week or so, things randomly segfault (simple 
> things like "ps" or "top").
> 
> -- 
> Alan Garrison  ___ agarris@voyager.net
> "MD5:  An encryption method used on the Internet."
> - Microsoft IIS 4.0 Glossary
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