*BSD News Article 89685


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Can hardware problems result in SIGSEGV and SIGBUS?
Date: 18 Feb 1997 00:21:29 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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gusw@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Gunther Schadow) wrote:

> >Of course.  Some Linux guy even setup a ``Sig 11 home page'' for this.
> 
> do you know an address of that home page?

No, but look out in some Linux group.

> So, it might be the board? I guess these PCI boards are rather
> unreliable, aren't they?

``It depends.'' :)

> I never heard of or experienced so many
> hardware problems with all ISA boards that I had before. Dammit!

Neither had i with my PCI boards so far. :-) But for sure, i've seen
crappy PCI boards en masse.  It pays off in the end to spend some DM
100 more in a decent board.  So far, i think ASUS had only one widely
known misfortune (that's been the use of the totally buggy SMC8669F
chip on some older Tr*ton boards).

Don't forget: the CPUs are getting faster and faster, and in order to
be cheap, some vendors tend to operate hard at the border of
usability.  10 pF more dead capacitance make can already be very
important these days -- this wasn't the case with a 386/sx16.

> >You aren't perchance overclocking your CPU?
> 
> Sorry? Would you like to explain what "overclocking" is?

Running at more than the designed speed.  I.e., if iNtel designed that
CPU to run at 100 MHz, but you're operating it at 133 MHz (knowingly
or innocently), the picture might also to get various mystic traps.
Most Windows users don't immediately suspect hardware problems if they
see Yet Another General Protection Fault... so they probably won't
even notice this.  Alas, it's hard to know the real CPU speed if some
dealer was cheating.  Read the various horror stories in the c't
magazine...

ps: No, i don't know how much you're losing by disabling the external
cache.  OTOH, if your machine is still under warranty, return it if it
doesn't work.

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)