[plug] Memory testing

[Cameron Patrick]

On Sun, Mar 02, 2003 at 09:06:36PM +0800, Craig Dyke wrote:
| I have been having some trouble lately with my puter and have
| been told by a number of people that the problem is more than likely
| with my memory (RAM not brain).
| 
| I have run memtest on my machine for 48 hours and yielded no errors found.

It might be dodgy L2 cache or an overheated CPU.  The L2 cache on my
home gateway box appears to be completely broken.  Programs were
segfaulting left, right and centre until I disabled it.

(Re. what Bernard said: I've also seen a machine hang because its CPU fan
had stopped entirely, but presumably you'd have noticed if that was the
case.  I'd be surprised if the hard drive was at fault here, I have a
7200rpm which runs somewhat warm in an underventilated case[1] and it
hasn't caused me any problems yet.)

There's also a kernel patch around called "badram" which allows you to
selectively disable certain areas of memory.  With debian, you can
apt-get install kernel-patch-badram.

CP.

[1] Two NVIDIA graphics cards with the fans ripped out, CPU fan replaced
with a quieter, less powerful one, and a rather wimpy power supply fan.
The side of the case is warm to the touch and the CPU runs at ~55
degrees on a hot day, but is so far completely stable.....