I stumbled upon a strange bug in the 2.4.0-test[9-10] kernels, which only happens on PII (Deschutes) processors: right after boot, it starts spitting "floating point exception"s all over the place, every time aborting the program it was executing. This begins to happen very early, before any modules have been loaded. I do not know whether this bug was present in previous 2.4.0-test versions. Notably, the kernels are recompiled with the same source and options of the one that is currently running without problems on my laptop and on all other PIIIs I tried it on, except for the processor option, which is set to "Pentium III" for PIIIs and to "Pentium-Pro/Celeron/Pentium II" for PIIs. I just did: cp .config .config.myconfig make mrproper mv .config.myconfig .config make menuconfig <change only processor family and save> make dep make bzImage make modules <install, adjust lilo and reboot> floating point exceptions when fscking partitions, when doing depmod... No oopses. This happens exactly in the same way on two different computers with the same hardware configuration, so I don't think it is a hardware bug, and both work fine with a 2.2.17 kernel. The floating point exceptions are not deterministic, they do not always happen at the same point in the boot process, but are random and frequent. Any program that runs for a long enough time (e.g. a tripwire run) invariably triggers it. Please ask any more needed information and I will gladly provide it. Bye Giacomo Mulas ________________________________________________________________________ Giacomo Mulas <[EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]> ________________________________________________________________________ OSSERVATORIO ASTRONOMICO Str. 54, Loc. Poggio dei Pini * 09012 Capoterra (CA) Tel.: +39 070 71180 216 Fax : +39 070 71180 222 ________________________________________________________________________ "When the storms are raging around you, stay right where you are" (Freddy Mercury) ________________________________________________________________________ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/