Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 23 Mar 1999 05:23:32 -0500 (EST) | From | "Mike A. Harris" <> | Subject | Determination of machine lockups |
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Recently I've had my machine locking up regularly. This is a *VERY* odd thing to have happening in Linux period from my experience.
I'm running 2.0.36, and have been using it since it came out. Just recently I installed VMWARE beta, and recompiled my kernel to have a few features that VMWARE requires. I had a few lockups while using vmware, and I immediately attributed them to the product itself since it uses 2 provided kernel modules.
The product worked just fine, however after a while my machine would 100% freeze, with nothing in the logfiles at all. No way of determining exactly what it was.
Then later in Win95 I had a lockup too. This wasn't odd to me, for obvious reasons, but since then *ALL* operating systems have been seeming to lock up for no reason. It is entirely possible that all of these lockups are unrelated, however the symptom is the same. Total freeze of all hardware, no response from anything including keyboard LED's.
I reverted my kernel to the pre-vmware one, and even uninstalled vmware. The lockups persist.
I thought maybe my CPU was overheating, since the fan is quite dusty. I have no idea how to pinpoint this problem down tight to a specific thing, and would like help doing so.
I booted last night and never logged in. I left the machine running all night, and when I awoke, the system was locked hard.
Tonight I removed the CPU fan (ball bearing, very high quality bolt-on type) and vacuumed it off intensely. It is silent, and appears to operate much smoother now. I also smeared silicone heat sink grease on top of my K6 (200Mhz not overclocked).
I have no way of knowing quite yet wether this will solve the problem since I don't really know if my suspicion of overheating is correct. The grease cant hurt though.
Can someone suggest a troubleshooting path (software) that I can use to determine if my kernel is locking due to a bug, or perhaps to something I've upgraded foolishly?
Would booting into single user mode and leaving the system all night be a good indicator? If the system locks I mean...
Any suggestions for testing via software (I'm going to use memtest86 next) would also be greatly appreciated.
Any hardware level tests that don't require external equipment would also be appreciated. I have a DMM here, but I can't see it being very useful tracking such an odd problem. It seems that the system works for several hours before locking. I would think that if it were overheating it would lock sooner, especially on an idle system.
Well, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thanks.
-- Mike A. Harris Linux advocate GNU advocate Computer Consultant Open Source advocate
The DVORAK keyboard layout RULES! I memorized it in 45 minutes and I don't think I'm ever going back to QWERTY!
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