[plug] Request for Comment - need suggestions and clue-bats

[Onno Benschop]

As a Linux user for many years - debian potato anyone? I've had my fair
share of "fun" in relation to making a stable environment. In 2009 after
too many crashes I bit the bullet and virtualised my Linux experience. I
bought a 17" MacBook Pro, installed VMware Fusion on it and ran my Linux
desktop inside VMware. I still do. Best business decision I ever made.

Based on that track record, I'm reluctant to depreciate my use of VMware on
a Mac, but my last 8 months have been less than optimal. I purchased a late
2015 27" Retina iMac and loaded it up with 64Gb of RAM. It's currently
running El Capitain.

It crashes an awful lot. OWC have swapped out the RAM and tell me that
there is nothing wrong. Apple told me that they don't support 64Gb of RAM,
OWC says othewise. VMware tells me that the microcode on the SkyLake
processor is out of date, Intel agrees and Apple waves its hands in the air
in the hope I won't notice that they're not actually doing anything.

I'm loathe to run Windows as my Host OS, and it's unclear if the boot
process would load a microcode update for the processor, so I could
actually see if that made a difference. Similarly, I'm not keen to go to a
Linux Host, since prior to 2009, that resulted in countless days and weeks
of downtime when <insert random hardware> stopped being supported or wasn't
quite compatible with my hardware and again I'm not sure I'll get a
boot-level microcode update via that mechanism.

I'm at a loss what to do next and I'm looking for suggestions.

Functionality I use daily:

   - Linux as my Desktop
   - VMware snapshots to test new software / test updates
   - VMware machines for different clients

I'm seriously contemplating selling my near new iMac and starting again,
but I'm not at all sure what that might look like. I have work to do and my
current set-up just isn't helping.

Is there something I should investigate, some aspect of what I'm doing that
is in need of review?

>From a troubleshooting perspective, I've swapped out RAM until I was blue
in the face. So far I can make Memtest86 pass if I turn off all but one CPU
core. I can reliably make my machine crash by running OSX Photos and
exporting a 1080p slideshow and VMware randomly crashes with spurious
errors - sometimes killing VMware, sometimes the login session, sometimes
the kernel.
-- 
Onno Benschop

()/)/)()        ..ASCII for Onno..
|>>?            ..EBCDIC for Onno..
--- -. -. ---   ..Morse for Onno..

If you need to know: "What computer should I buy?" http://goo.gl/spsb66

ITmaze   -   ABN: 56 178 057 063   -  ph: 04 1219 8888   -
onno at itmaze.com.au
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