On Thursday 09 November 2006 07:51, Duncan wrote: > Mauro Maroni <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted > [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Wed, 08 Nov > > 2006 20:25:25 -0300: > > Well, then I got segfaults compiling other packages, and a couple of > > times the machine freezed doing trivial things like browsing the web. > > Could this be a hardware issue? RAM seems to be OK as I ran memtest > > during the night and did not show any error after 9 hours. > > That's a classic hardware issue, yes. The cause can be one of several > things. Note that there are at least two ways RAM can be bad and memtest > checks only one -- memory actually corrupting in storage. From hard > experience, I know the other one all too well -- AND know that memtest > doesn't catch it AT ALL. That one is memory timing issues, and as > memory speeds increase, it's becoming more and more common. Taking my > case as an example, the RAM was rated PC3200, but simply wasn't stable at > that. Unfortunately, my mobo was new enough at the time, and using the > then new AMD64 memory-controller-on-CPU technology, that the BIOS didn't > have the usual memory speed tweaking options. After fighting with it for > some time, a BIOS upgrade was eventually made available that added these > options, and a very simple (with the right BIOS option) tweak to reduce > memory clocking from the rated PC3200 (200 MHz DDRed to 400, times 8 bit > bus width, equals 3200) to ~PC3000 (183 MHz DDred to 366, times 8, rounds > to 3000) eliminated the issue entirely. The system was then rock-stable, > even after tweaking some of the detailed individual wait-state settings > back up to increase the performance a bit from the defaults. > > So, before you eliminate memory as a possibility, check your BIOS and try > declocking it a notch or two.
It has been very stable during the last days. But I will give this a try if the problem comes back. Thanks a lot for your answer. Mauro -- gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list
