[ale] indecipherable hard crash

[Mike Panetta]

On Wed, 2002-07-31 at 07:23, joshy wrote:
> Anyone know if it's possible for a JVM to hard crash a linux box?

Anything is possible...

> 
> The story:

[snip of explanation]

> 
> At this point I can only assume that either the memory is bad
> or misconfigured some how. Still, I would have expected to see
> more errors printed somewhere.

If the memory is bad, and you have no form of error
correction/detection, you may not get any messages at all.  I suggest
you download a copy of memtest86 and try to see if its a memory error. 
You may need to run it for several hrs (possibly over half a day) for
that much memory, but it would be worth it to solve such a frustrating
problem.  

Maybe an even quicker way to find a problem (assuming only one of the
dimms was bad) is to swap the memory dimms.  If the problem happens
after loading fewer programs into memory, or even immediately after
boot, then you know within all probability that the dimm in the first
dimm slot is bad.  

Another thing to check would be to make sure both dimms are the same
speed, and put the slowest in the first slot.  I am not sure, but some
motherboards may only read the SPD EEPROM on the first dimm to get the
timing info, and apply that to both dimms.  This would obviously be bad
if you had a PC133 dimm in the first slot, and a PC100 dimm in the
second (for example).

Do you know if the hardware supports ECC ram?  If it does did you buy
ECC ram? (I assume not, since you did not get any error messages, I
think an ECC error would give you a bluesmoke error on a 2.4 kernel.)


> Any ideas?
> Thanks,
> 
> - Joshua
> 

HTH,
Mike


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