Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: coreutils-6.4 - cannot compile

[Mauro Maroni <mmaroni@fi.uba.ar>]

On Thursday 09 November 2006 07:51, Duncan wrote:
> Mauro Maroni <mmaroni@fi.uba.ar> posted
> 200611082025.25462.mmaroni@fi.uba.ar, excerpted below, on  Wed, 08 Nov
>
> 2006 20:25:25 -0300:
> > Well, then I got segfaults compiling other packages, and a couple of
> > times the machine freezed doing trivial things like browsing the web.
> > Could this be a hardware issue? RAM seems to be OK as I ran memtest
> > during the night and did not show any error after 9 hours.
>
> That's a classic hardware issue, yes.  The cause can be one of several
> things.  Note that there are at least two ways RAM can be bad and memtest
> checks only one -- memory actually corrupting in storage.  From hard
> experience, I know the other one all too well -- AND know that memtest
> doesn't catch it AT ALL.  That one is memory timing issues, and as
> memory speeds increase, it's becoming more and more common.  Taking my
> case as an example, the RAM was rated PC3200, but simply wasn't stable at
> that.  Unfortunately, my mobo was new enough at the time, and using the
> then new AMD64 memory-controller-on-CPU technology, that the BIOS didn't
> have the usual memory speed tweaking options.  After fighting with it for
> some time, a BIOS upgrade was eventually made available that added these
> options, and a very simple (with the right BIOS option) tweak to reduce
> memory clocking from the rated PC3200 (200 MHz DDRed to 400, times 8 bit
> bus width, equals 3200) to ~PC3000 (183 MHz DDred to 366, times 8, rounds
> to 3000) eliminated the issue entirely.  The system was then rock-stable,
> even after tweaking some of the detailed individual wait-state settings
> back up to increase the performance a bit from the defaults.
>
> So, before you eliminate memory as a possibility, check your BIOS and try
> declocking it a notch or two.

It has been very stable during the last days.  But I will give this a try if 
the problem comes back. Thanks a lot for your answer.

Mauro

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