Re: [gentoo-amd64] System crashes when idle

[Peter Humphrey <prh@gotadsl.co.uk>]

On Tuesday 29 May 2007 07:59:42 Michael Ulm wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I seem to get system crashes on my machine when it is idle for
> some time. Here is a typical crashing session:
[...]
> Maybe it's the hardware, but what kind of hardware issue could cause
> these symptoms?
>
> Any ideas anyone?

A couple. Either RAM or hard disk would be my first suspect. You can check 
the RAM best by compiling any large package, such as gcc itself. Memtest 
and its like can only find the most obvious faults and in my opinion aren't 
worth their salt - if they can find a fault, it will already be obvious to 
you.

Secondly, with the advent of SATA I'm suspecting a new class of fault in 
hard disks. Not only do we have the traditional transfer errors, but now I 
suspect it's possible for some faults to allow voltage spikes to be imposed 
on the line driver and cause random errors in other subsystems. I may be 
wrong, but I've had one experience of this already, and I'm currently 
working to eliminate another disk as the cause of weird problems I'm 
having.

Oh, and there's always the power supply. If that goes wonky it can cause all 
manner of problems. You could well suspect it if problems don't occur until 
after the system's been running for quite a while.

-- 
Rgds
Peter Humphrey
Linux Counter 5290, Aug 93
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