Apparently, though unproven, at 23:02 on Monday 11 October 2010, Mark Knecht did opine thusly:
> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 1:39 PM, Alan McKinnon <[email protected]> wrote: > > Uh-oh. > > > > genlop started failing today with the mysterious error "Illegal > > instruction", and it's consistent - every time. That's all the message, > > nothing else: > > > > $ genlop -t portage > > Illegal instruction > > > > Now emerge dbus-glib fails similarly: > > > > /bin/sh: line 21: 1084 Illegal instruction /usr/bin/gtkdoc-rebase -- > > relative --dest-dir=/var/tmp/portage/dev-libs/dbus-glib-0.88/image/ > > --html- dir=${installdir} > > > > > > I don't really know where to start looking..... > > I just know Google is going to give me millions of useless hits with that > > search, but I'll hope over to b.g.o. meanwhile and poke around unless > > someone else has a better idea. > > Alan, > Consider (if possible - is this a desktop or some in service > server?) powering down your machine, reseating your memory DIMMs, > powering back up and if possible running memtest86 (assuming it's an > x86 machine) and then seeing if the error goes away. > > I've run into this a couple of times when memory problems have appeared. Yes, that was it - memtest failed almost immediately. It's my notebook, with 2 x 2G memory banks - either one in either position works fine. With both, memtest fails and always at the same place - step 48 of whatever. So I guess it's the motherboard and I'll be calling Dell Support in the morning. Am I glad the company insists we buy 3 year next-day on-site corporate support for all hardware right now? You betcha! -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
