[gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!
Hi, Gentoo, My new Gentoo box has become unusably unstable. The first sign was when the compiler threw a segfault whilst emerging the xfce window manager. I solved this by emerging Openbox instead. Then I got another compiler segfault whilst emerging firefox (yes, I know there's a binary for this). Then, on somebody's advice (not fully understood), I did # emerge -e gcc , to try and get a consistent working gcc. This crashed. I repeated the invocation, and it crashed more quickly. :-( At this point, I thought, just reload everything from the stage3, with # cd / ; bunzip2 /stage3-amd64-20100121.tar.gz , which didn't help either. I emerged gentoolkit, to see if I could get some handle on the mess. Then # revdep-rebuild -p threw a segfault. At this point, I'm feeling a bit sad. My rough guess is that there's some conflict somewhere between 32-bit and 64-bit code, and some of my USE flags are inconsistent with some others, or the kernel, or something like that. One other thing I remember vaguely is that early on, some emerge told me I had to revdep-rebuild something. I wasn't able to do this through not yet knowing what revdep-rebuild meant, and not having any file of that name on my system. Could this be the cause? Finally, is there a way of reloading/rebuilding ALL the executables onto/on my system without discarding all my painfully wrought config files and without portage getting confused? Thanks in advance for the help! -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
Re: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!
On Friday 12 February 2010 10:54:53 Alan Mackenzie wrote: Hi, Gentoo, My new Gentoo box has become unusably unstable. The first sign was when the compiler threw a segfault whilst emerging the xfce window manager. I solved this by emerging Openbox instead. Then I got another compiler segfault whilst emerging firefox (yes, I know there's a binary for this). everything you mention below is indicative of failing hardware, especially RAM closely followed by PSU. Swap them out with known good items and test thoroughly *before* doing anything else. Then, on somebody's advice (not fully understood), I did # emerge -e gcc , to try and get a consistent working gcc. This crashed. I repeated the invocation, and it crashed more quickly. :-( At this point, I thought, just reload everything from the stage3, with # cd / ; bunzip2 /stage3-amd64-20100121.tar.gz , which didn't help either. I emerged gentoolkit, to see if I could get some handle on the mess. Then # revdep-rebuild -p threw a segfault. At this point, I'm feeling a bit sad. My rough guess is that there's some conflict somewhere between 32-bit and 64-bit code, and some of my USE flags are inconsistent with some others, or the kernel, or something like that. One other thing I remember vaguely is that early on, some emerge told me I had to revdep-rebuild something. I wasn't able to do this through not yet knowing what revdep-rebuild meant, and not having any file of that name on my system. Could this be the cause? Finally, is there a way of reloading/rebuilding ALL the executables onto/on my system without discarding all my painfully wrought config files and without portage getting confused? Thanks in advance for the help! -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
Re: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!
I am (was) getting this as well on a new amd64 install (zotac ION n330) - it appears there is a problem with certain glibc 32bit libraries - there is a bug about it. Upgraded glibc and most things are now happy - but I still cant build gcc. BillK On Fri, 2010-02-12 at 10:50 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: On Friday 12 February 2010 10:54:53 Alan Mackenzie wrote: Hi, Gentoo, My new Gentoo box has become unusably unstable. The first sign was when the compiler threw a segfault whilst emerging the xfce window manager. I solved this by emerging Openbox instead. Then I got another compiler segfault whilst emerging firefox (yes, I know there's a binary for this). everything you mention below is indicative of failing hardware, especially RAM closely followed by PSU. Swap them out with known good items and test thoroughly *before* doing anything else. Then, on somebody's advice (not fully understood), I did # emerge -e gcc , to try and get a consistent working gcc. This crashed. I repeated the invocation, and it crashed more quickly. :-( At this point, I thought, just reload everything from the stage3, with # cd / ; bunzip2 /stage3-amd64-20100121.tar.gz , which didn't help either. I emerged gentoolkit, to see if I could get some handle on the mess. Then # revdep-rebuild -p threw a segfault. At this point, I'm feeling a bit sad. My rough guess is that there's some conflict somewhere between 32-bit and 64-bit code, and some of my USE flags are inconsistent with some others, or the kernel, or something like that. One other thing I remember vaguely is that early on, some emerge told me I had to revdep-rebuild something. I wasn't able to do this through not yet knowing what revdep-rebuild meant, and not having any file of that name on my system. Could this be the cause? Finally, is there a way of reloading/rebuilding ALL the executables onto/on my system without discarding all my painfully wrought config files and without portage getting confused? Thanks in advance for the help! -- William Kenworthy bi...@iinet.net.au Home in Perth!
Re: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!
On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 10:50:46AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: On Friday 12 February 2010 10:54:53 Alan Mackenzie wrote: Hi, Gentoo, My new Gentoo box has become unusably unstable. The first sign was when the compiler threw a segfault whilst emerging the xfce window manager. I solved this by emerging Openbox instead. Then I got another compiler segfault whilst emerging firefox (yes, I know there's a binary for this). everything you mention below is indicative of failing hardware, especially RAM closely followed by PSU. Swap them out with known good items and test thoroughly *before* doing anything else. I hope you're not right here. ;-) The hardware is spanking brand new; so new, in fact, that it's still gleaming. Are there any handy utility programs around to test RAM exhaustively? [ ] -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
Re: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!
On 12 Feb, Alan Mackenzie wrote: On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 10:50:46AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: On Friday 12 February 2010 10:54:53 Alan Mackenzie wrote: Hi, Gentoo, My new Gentoo box has become unusably unstable. The first sign was when the compiler threw a segfault whilst emerging the xfce window manager. I solved this by emerging Openbox instead. Then I got another compiler segfault whilst emerging firefox (yes, I know there's a binary for this). everything you mention below is indicative of failing hardware, especially RAM closely followed by PSU. Swap them out with known good items and test thoroughly *before* doing anything else. I hope you're not right here. ;-) The hardware is spanking brand new; so new, in fact, that it's still gleaming. Are there any handy utility programs around to test RAM exhaustively? I have made good experience with sys-apps/memtester. If you have not more than 4 Gb RAM, you can use the SystemRescueCD. Otherwise the GRML64 RescueCD has a true 64 bit version of memtester. I have made the experience that memtester finds errors more quickly than memtest86+ . Helmut. -- Helmut Jarausch Lehrstuhl fuer Numerische Mathematik RWTH - Aachen University D 52056 Aachen, Germany
Re: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!
snip I hope you're not right here. ;-) The hardware is spanking brand new; so new, in fact, that it's still gleaming. Are there any handy utility programs around to test RAM exhaustively? Most live CD's these days will come with memtest86 as a boot option, that would give your RAM a good workout and tell you how it looks. It could be that the RAM itself is perfectly fine, but just not working too well with your motherboard hardware, I have seen this many times before where in one system the RAM is completely unusable, but in a different system is perfectly fine. [ ] -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
Re: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!
On Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:46:33 + Alan Mackenzie a...@muc.de wrote: On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 10:50:46AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: On Friday 12 February 2010 10:54:53 Alan Mackenzie wrote: Hi, Gentoo, My new Gentoo box has become unusably unstable. The first sign was when the compiler threw a segfault whilst emerging the xfce window manager. I solved this by emerging Openbox instead. Then I got another compiler segfault whilst emerging firefox (yes, I know there's a binary for this). everything you mention below is indicative of failing hardware, especially RAM closely followed by PSU. Swap them out with known good items and test thoroughly *before* doing anything else. I hope you're not right here. ;-) The hardware is spanking brand new; so new, in fact, that it's still gleaming. Are there any handy utility programs around to test RAM exhaustively? [ ] -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com you may wanna look at memtest86+, its in portage http://www.memtest.org/
Re: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!
On Feb 12, 2010, at 3:46 AM, Alan Mackenzie wrote: On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 10:50:46AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: I hope you're not right here. ;-) The hardware is spanking brand new; so new, in fact, that it's still gleaming. Are there any handy utility programs around to test RAM exhaustively? I use a kubuntu live disk, one of the boot options is to run memtest. I typically let it run a several hours on a new box. The second issue might be heat (or cooling depending on your point of view). A couple of things, easiest is to install the lm_sensors and your favorite capture utility. I also will use an IR thermometer and DMM with temperature probe to verify cooling. With lm_sensors running, I'll run several stress tests to find the hottest the system will run. If the system gets too hot, I'll increase cooling (more/faster fans). Another thing to check is that the memory is seated properly. I'd remove the modules, inspect the connectors, then very carefully reinstall them. While you are at it, make sure all connectors are seated correctly. HTH, Roy
Re: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!
Another thing to try, change compile flag to -J1 (MAKEOPTS=-J1 emerge ...) Last time I built up a system there were a couple of packages that couldn't handle parallel compiles. HTH, Roy
Re: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!
On Friday 12 February 2010 11:46:33 Alan Mackenzie wrote: On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 10:50:46AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: On Friday 12 February 2010 10:54:53 Alan Mackenzie wrote: Hi, Gentoo, My new Gentoo box has become unusably unstable. The first sign was when the compiler threw a segfault whilst emerging the xfce window manager. I solved this by emerging Openbox instead. Then I got another compiler segfault whilst emerging firefox (yes, I know there's a binary for this). everything you mention below is indicative of failing hardware, especially RAM closely followed by PSU. Swap them out with known good items and test thoroughly *before* doing anything else. I hope you're not right here. ;-) The hardware is spanking brand new; so new, in fact, that it's still gleaming. The engineering phrase infant mortality comes to mind :-) Are there any handy utility programs around to test RAM exhaustively? memtest is pretty good at this. Let it run for many hours, there's lots of tips out there in Googleland on how to get good results -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
Re: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!
Hi, Alan, On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 10:50:46AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: On Friday 12 February 2010 10:54:53 Alan Mackenzie wrote: Hi, Gentoo, My new Gentoo box has become unusably unstable. The first sign was when the compiler threw a segfault whilst emerging the xfce window manager. I solved this by emerging Openbox instead. Then I got another compiler segfault whilst emerging firefox (yes, I know there's a binary for this). everything you mention below is indicative of failing hardware, especially RAM closely followed by PSU. Yes, you're right. :-( When I run memtest86 from the gentoo boot disk, it signals millions of failures in b11 of 32 bit words. I'll try unplugging and replugging these. Thanks for the tip. alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
Re: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!
On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 12:54 AM, Alan Mackenzie a...@muc.de wrote: Hi, Gentoo, My new Gentoo box has become unusably unstable. The first sign was when the compiler threw a segfault whilst emerging the xfce window manager. I solved this by emerging Openbox instead. Then I got another compiler segfault whilst emerging firefox (yes, I know there's a binary for this). Then, on somebody's advice (not fully understood), I did # emerge -e gcc , to try and get a consistent working gcc. This crashed. I repeated the invocation, and it crashed more quickly. :-( At this point, I thought, just reload everything from the stage3, with # cd / ; bunzip2 /stage3-amd64-20100121.tar.gz , which didn't help either. I emerged gentoolkit, to see if I could get some handle on the mess. Then # revdep-rebuild -p threw a segfault. At this point, I'm feeling a bit sad. My rough guess is that there's some conflict somewhere between 32-bit and 64-bit code, and some of my USE flags are inconsistent with some others, or the kernel, or something like that. One other thing I remember vaguely is that early on, some emerge told me I had to revdep-rebuild something. I wasn't able to do this through not yet knowing what revdep-rebuild meant, and not having any file of that name on my system. Could this be the cause? Finally, is there a way of reloading/rebuilding ALL the executables onto/on my system without discarding all my painfully wrought config files and without portage getting confused? Thanks in advance for the help! -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany). +1 for memtest86. Since it's new hardware possibly your CPU fan isn't well seated? Failures while compiling sound like heat to me. Failures at random times sound like heat, PSU and memory problems. Hope tis helps, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!
On 12 Feb, Alan Mackenzie wrote: Hi, Gentoo, My new Gentoo box has become unusably unstable. Just one more reason. Have you got more than 4 Gb RAM installed? If yes, you might have to reduce memory speed. Some CPUs (among them AMD Phenom) have difficulties at the specified RAM speed if more than 1 memory bank is installed. I have been burnt by that several times. Helmut. -- Helmut Jarausch Lehrstuhl fuer Numerische Mathematik RWTH - Aachen University D 52056 Aachen, Germany
Re: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!
On Freitag 12 Februar 2010, Alan Mackenzie wrote: Hi, Alan, On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 10:50:46AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: On Friday 12 February 2010 10:54:53 Alan Mackenzie wrote: Hi, Gentoo, My new Gentoo box has become unusably unstable. The first sign was when the compiler threw a segfault whilst emerging the xfce window manager. I solved this by emerging Openbox instead. Then I got another compiler segfault whilst emerging firefox (yes, I know there's a binary for this). everything you mention below is indicative of failing hardware, especially RAM closely followed by PSU. Yes, you're right. :-( When I run memtest86 from the gentoo boot disk, it signals millions of failures in b11 of 32 bit words. I'll try unplugging and replugging these. Thanks for the tip. alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com you can try upping the voltage of the ram by 0.05V. I had a stick that threw errors unless I gave it a bit more. After that the system was stable and none of the memtesting apps found any errors.
Re: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!
On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 6:33 AM, Helmut Jarausch jarau...@igpm.rwth-aachen.de wrote: On 12 Feb, Alan Mackenzie wrote: Hi, Gentoo, My new Gentoo box has become unusably unstable. Just one more reason. Have you got more than 4 Gb RAM installed? If yes, you might have to reduce memory speed. Some CPUs (among them AMD Phenom) have difficulties at the specified RAM speed if more than 1 memory bank is installed. I have been burnt by that several times. Helmut. I had exactly the situation you described. 4 GB of RAM worked great at 800MHz but when I increased to 8 GB I had to lower speed to something like 533 MHz otherwise system was very unstable. In my case Intel Core 2 Duo E6600. I contacted the RAM manufacturer and this was their recommendation as well.
Re: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!
On Freitag 12 Februar 2010, Helmut Jarausch wrote: On 12 Feb, Alan Mackenzie wrote: Hi, Gentoo, My new Gentoo box has become unusably unstable. Just one more reason. Have you got more than 4 Gb RAM installed? If yes, you might have to reduce memory speed. Some CPUs (among them AMD Phenom) have difficulties at the specified RAM speed if more than 1 memory bank is installed. I have been burnt by that several times. Helmut. no, not entirely true. There is a problem with Phenoms and DDR2 1066 when for modules are installed. You can get that configuration stable with an high quality board and some voltage tricks. If you have problems at lower speed and 4banks, you have a crappy mainboard. Maybe increasing voltages a bit (0.05 to 0.1V) will help you. It did for me with one certain Asrock board.
Re: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!
Hi, Volker, On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 01:56:48PM +0100, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: you can try upping the voltage of the ram by 0.05V. I had a stick that threw errors unless I gave it a bit more. After that the system was stable and none of the memtesting apps found any errors. Tried that with the voltage everywhere from 1.5v to 1.6v in 0.02v steps. It didn't help. It turns out, one of the RAM sticks was kaputt. -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
