Michael Thomson wrote:
Trevor Boicey, P. Eng. wrote:
Run this overnight:
http://www.memtest86.com/
Hi Trevor
Thanks for your suggestion. I was wondering along these lines myself, but
didn't know what tool to use. MemTest is now in my toolbox permanently!
I have some preliminary results, but I'll try an all night run to be sure.
Memtest reported zero errors over 10 passes through the standard test suite.
So it looks like the memory may be OK after all.
Any other avenues to try?
It might not be the memory, but still be hardware.
In theory, when a program like xawtv is running (not in grabdisplay)
all it has to do is reserve some memory and the bttv card keeps filling
it using DMA.
If some bits get flipped in the transaction, then it might start
spraying bits around other areas of memory. So who-knows-what might
start crashing, since this is outside the usual kernel MMU protection
that keeps bad programs from corrupting others.
In my case, the window in xawtv kept shifting. The screen would,
after a few minutes, start wrapping around. it was moving towards the
right, and you'd start to see a little image appear wrapped-around to
the left.
Usually by the time it got so about 10% of the TV image was wrapped
over, the system usually crashed, often with lots of junk sprayed around
the X desktop before it actually failed.
At the time, I didn't actually use memtest to diagnose it, I just
swapped memory around and found that crashing just followed that memory
stick. I'd be curious if that stick would actually fail memtest.
--
Trevor Boicey, P. Eng.
Ottawa, Canada, tboicey@xxxxxxx
ICQ #17432933 http://www.brit.ca/~tboicey/
"I'm going to die! And I've never tasted Canteloupe!" - Mo Sizlak
