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SubjectDetermination of machine lockups
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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