On 11/30/06, Vladimir G. Ivanovic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I have done nothing to my hardware and I've seen this error, oh, a half a dozen times, the last time 3 months (?) ago. I ran memtest when I installed new memory, and it did not report problems even when run for hours.
memtest is basically useless these days. It can only tell you if you have a bad memory cell, which almost never happens today. Most memory problems are the result of timing issues between the processor(s) and DMA controllers. This script [1] seems to be a much better memory test for modern systems, although you may have to make some tweaks to run it on Gentoo.
And I do not get random segfaults with other programs.
Yes, compiling is very unique in this regard. The memory access pattern of a compiler, reading and writing to locations on different rows, or even different modules, under high CPU load and using lots of memory, with some IO thrown in for good measure, tends to reveal hardware problems quite nicely.
Finally, I don't think my hardware fixed itself. Given all of this, my suspicion is that these errors are software bugs, not hardware problems.
If we were talking about a driver, or an event-based GUI program, I might agree. But a compiler is going to take the exact same actions given the same input and options. The compiler isn't going to do something different between 2 different executions over the _exact_ same sources because it feels like it.
The other thing that I don't really believe is the part about "this bug not being reproducible" as reported by portage/emerge/make/gcc.
Then you should read the gcc sources. One of the patches applied by Gentoo adds a retry loop when the compiler is about to exit with an internal compiler error (ICE). It retries the compile twice, and if either of those succeeds, you get the "The bug is not reproducible" message. It doesn't output anything because that would possibly obscure the original error. The gentoo devs probably added this loop to avoid more duplicates of [2]. -Richard [1] http://people.redhat.com/dledford/memtest.html [2] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20600 -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
