> From: Bill Carlson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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>
> On Wed, 12 Jan 2000, Ward William E PHDN wrote:
>
> > A lot of folks, such as Nate here, have been saying that Linux rarely
> > crashes.
>
> I was going to comment that Linux does crash, you beat me to it. Over the
> years I've found 3 things that usually the cause of a crash (not including
> fork bombs and stuff like that. Linux can seem dead if it is really really
> busy, but if one is patient one can usually fix the problem).
>
> 1. XFree86 - Nothing kills a machine faster than buggy video drivers.
> Sometimes only the display gets wacked and one can telnet in and reboot
> the machine, sometimes not.
As was already mentioned, an X-server problem should not lock up the
machine - you should be able to telnet it or use virtual consoles to
log in again and kill the X-server. This is not to say that it can't
happen as it is practically impossible to build large software systems
w/o any bugs.
> 2. Bad hardware - I'm fighting this right now. I have two identical
> machines (well, the setups are identical, some of the cards might be at
> different revisions, but still the same model). One machine locks up SOLID
> sometime in the middle of the night, usually when something intensive is
> going on. Same hard drive (so I know it is not a software problem) in the
> other machine works just fine. I suspect heat is causing me a problem,
> don't know. The point is that bad memory or a flaky video card can't
> magically be isolated by Linux, this is the curse of x86 hardware.
>
> 3. Heat - Again, if the hardware starts acting flaky, there is nothing the
> OS can do on x86.
Neither of these are Linux's fault - you can't blame software for
crashing on bad hardware.
Dave
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