Hot Diggety! Nick Fisher was rumored to have written: > Every kernel I have compiled for this one machine has failed. My general > test is to recompile the kernel multiple times (As recomended by > DRobbins). One of my kernels once made it through three compiles. If I > start from the liveCD and chroot into my gentoo install and compile, it > goes for days. So (unless I have missed something) the problem appears to > be the kernel. I did think it was hardware for some time but after a few > days of CPUburn and Memtest86 I have basicly discounted that. If it were
Don't be too quick to discount it. It is possible to run memtest86 and still not detect marginal RAM - friend was in that boat; memtest86 said it was clean but he stll replaced it, anyway, and all his problems went away when he put in the high quality RAM. He hasn't crashed once since. > the hardware I couldn't continuously compile the kernel for over a day > chrooted from the liveCD. > > So from what I can tell there is something *wrong* with the way I'm > compiling this kernel or the options I'm setting. When the machine crashes > it just stops. No errors, no nothing. It just stops. I have scoured the That basically sounds like an hardware issue of some sort. What's the CPU's temperature? (BIOS report or lm_sensors type of report) If it's getting too hot, it could be leading to random bit flips which results in either a nasty crash or undefined/unpredictable behavior. Another thought: could you try Mushkin RAM? (www.mushkin.com -- been a customer ever since it solved various stability issues...one on my Mac G4 system and one on my friend's Athlon system) Kernel compiles tend to stress the CPU and memory subsystem the most. Any issues with either subsystem will often result in crashed or wacky kernel compiles -- and not just under Linux, either. If it's just silently powering off, could potentially be some sort of VRM, power loading, power supply issue... but that's relatively rare. For your next compile run, you could also boot off the CD, fsck the filesystem, then cd /usr/src/linux ; make clean then restart your compile. -Dan -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
