On 2013-04-22, David Relson <rel...@osagesoftware.com> wrote: > On Sun, 21 Apr 2013 00:44:46 +0400 > the guard wrote: > >> >> >> >> Суббота, 20 апреля 2013, 19:56 UTC от Grant Edwards >> <grant.b.edwa...@gmail.com>: >> > On 2013-04-20, the guard <the.gu...@mail.ru> wrote: >> > >> > > The package i decided to install required a gcc rebuild so I >> > > started rebuilding it and got a bus error. I've googled and found >> > > suggestions to lower makeopts, but it didn't help. >> > >> > Every time I've gotten bus errors when building things it turned out >> > to be a hardware problem. >> > >> > Bad RAM, failing CPU, failing motherboard power supply capacitors, >> > bad disk controller card (obviously, that was a _long_ time ago). >> > >> > If I were you, I'd start by running memtest86+ overnight. >> >> >> memtest revealed nothing > > We had an old QNX machine start giving bus errors during compilation of > a large application. Running memtest (for approx 40 hrs) showed > nothing, but a close visual examination of the motherboard showed > bulging capacitors, i.e. failing capacitors.
"Bad caps"? Those can really give all the kinds of problems, and look really random. I've also seen occasions where a certain northbridge was less tolerant regarding voltages and would render the whole system unstable with a specific brand of memories (the memories were OK, but the system would still become unstable). There was also a more serious case where I started getting random segfaults with a computer, as I started leaving it on for longer and compiling larger programs. Apparently, the memory modules were seated in a less than optimal configuration, leading the motherboard to believe there was *another* memory module. Thing is, for several months the system was OK, because apparently it never needed more than the first half of the memory, or if it did, it did not try to use the result of addressing the second half. That was a lot of luck, I guess. (The less lucky part are the emerge -e systems anf emerge -e worlds which followed.) -- Nuno Silva (aka njsg) http://njsg.sdf-eu.org/
