On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 10:19:09PM +0000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On Sat, Oct 27, 2007 at 05:30:49PM +0100, Digby Tarvin wrote: > I have now had time to get back to investigating this, and after a > systematic test of all the differences between the 486 config and > the unstable 686 config, I have discovered that the critical item > was the setting for High Memory Support. In the 486 Kernel this > is set to 'off', and for the 686 kernel it is set to '4GB'. > > When running the (stable) 486 kernel I get the dmesg message: > Warning only 896MB will be used. > Use a HIGHMEM enabled kernel. > 896MB LOWMEM available. > > Having identified that this setting determines if my kernel will be > stable or not, I then tried booting the default (686) kernel with > the boot option 'mem=896M' (foregoing the top 128MB or ram) > > Sure enough, the full pentium Debian kernel is now stable! > > Still trying to find a way to determine if this indicates a fault > in this machine, or some subtle compatability issue with it. > > If anyone has any idea what might be causing this particular fault I > would be most intetested to hear. I would have thought some bad ram > would have been detected by the BIOS or the install disk memory tests. > And I am told that the Windows system which it came with runs without > any problem. I wonder if there is anything about the way HIGHMEM is > used that would show up some subtle flaw in this machine?
What happens if you swap memory around in the box. If it causes errors on your previously-stable kernel, then that's a sign. What happens if you install memtest+ which puts a line in grub's menulist so that you can boot into pure memtest and let it cook for a couple of days? Doug. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
