Re: PROBLEM: Oops when doing disk heavy disk I/O

["Ray Lee" <madrabbit@gmail.com>]

On 10/25/06, Michael <michael.sallaway@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Try swapping out the RAM (or getting it down to 1Gig). Try a really
> > old kernel, such as debian's 2.6.8 package.
>
> Well, what do you know -- that seems to have fixed it! I took out one stick
> of RAM (so it's down to 1 gig) and it seems to work fine, now, without any
> boot parameters or anything. (mind you, murphy's law will dictate that it'll
> crash about 30 seconds after I send this...)
>
> I'm amazed at that -- but I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth,
> this has been frustrating me for far too long. :-)
>
> Although, having said that, I'm curious... It is working because there's
> only 1 gig of RAM in there, or because it's only a single stick (ie. not
> dual-channel)? It works fine with both sticks, individually, just not both
> together... I wonder what the cause of it actually is...

That I don't know. Marginal power supplies can cause very strange
problems, or there can be motherboard/memory timing issues with lots
of RAM, or just plain old more-than-one-gig-of-RAM-tickles-software
bugs. Though the latter, especially on an x86-64 kernel, really
shouldn't be very common if present at all.

What I'd suggest is resending to the list the first oops after boot
(several of them would be good) while using 2 gigs of RAM, with a new
subject line to attract those who are especially good at reading these
things. (I can barely find the stack trace.)

Ray