On Wednesday 31 January 2007 14:27, Dave Oxley wrote: > Hi, > > I have a MythTV frontend running Gentoo on an AMD 64bit with an > Nvidia 6600 graphics card. I have had no end of problems with the > graphics card (Xid errors). It crashes with a white line across the > screen regularly when 3d goom is up when I'm playing music. I've so > far been putting it down to the nvidia driver but I'm beginning to > think I may have a dodgy stick of RAM or something as I also get > Segmentation faults when doing emerge's on occasion. When this > happens it says its an OS error and retrying the emerge normally > fixes it. How can I find out what the problem is? Is there a way of > testing the RAM? Is it possible that it is the nvidia drivers still > (I am often playing music when I run an emerge)??
Faulty or dodgy RAM is indeed often the cause behind random segfaults. The best test of all is gcc which is why you get the error more with emerge than anything else. gcc just happens to stress the ram and disk system in ways that few other peices of software do. There is a product called memtest86 which tests ram, but you have to run it for many many hours to be sure of ewhat it's saying. And, I have read reports that what memtest86 does is predictable, whereas a big emerge is much more random. How to test: Well, you could come up with a $40k once-off rig to test memory that costs a fdraction of that. The easy way is to just swap out the memory and try again. Buy some, it's not that expensive and you *will* use it somewhere soon anyway :-) Or borrow some DIMMS from a friend for a day or three alan -- [email protected] mailing list
