[ale] Another Newbie Question

[Curtis Smith]

> > I have Redhat 4.1 installed on my machine.  Every so often (at the
> worst
> > time possible),
> > I get the message "PANIC: Segmentation Violation. Giving Up!" and my
> > machine hangs,
> > and dadgummit, I have to reformat and reinstall.  Any idea what is
> > wrong? The recover disks are of little help, and I am at my wits
> end.
> > 
> > 
> 
> General advise:
> 
> Upgrade? Perhaps the 4.1 has a problem which was solved in 4.2
> 
> Enough swap space? Maybe you are running out of memory (virtual +
> real)
> 
I'm running 4.1 upgraded to 4.2 on all SCSI disks and 80Mhz 486, 32 Mb
RAM.

I beat the sense out of this box.  The running process list is several
screen fulls,
I've had >>100Mb swapped, tape backup, java, Netscape, Applixware all
churning
away....   Never crashed, even once.

In my view your problem is related to: an IDE disk that can't take heavy
load reliably.
In the cheap EIDE disk world,  more disks have flaky problems than
Western/Maxtor 
will admit.  But they work great under Win95...

Or RAM subsystem flaking and corrupting the Kernel / Supper block space.

Try slowing down your PIO mode.  I.E. Go from mode 4 to 3, or 3 to 2.

Since EIDE disk I/O clock rate is governed by the system clock, you may
try de-clocking
your system clock.  Especially if you have "over-clocked" your mother
board.

Try adding more DRAM wait states.  Just add one at a time.  

Beat your system up with compiles, lots of write and read IO.

Good luck.

curt