[mythtv-users] Myth segfaults: how to troubleshoot further?

f-myth-users at media.mit.edu f-myth-users at media.mit.edu
Tue May 5 21:19:39 UTC 2009


    > Date: Tue, 5 May 2009 14:49:08 -0400
    > From: Ronald Frazier <ron at ronfrazier.net>

    > The moral is, memtest usually finds any problems right away, but
    > sometime it needs to stress it a bit more.

...and sometimes it doesn't find them at all.  So while a memtest
error is clearly cause for concern, lack of an error doesn't mean
your memory (or motherboard) is necessarily good.

For example:  I had a problem once (on a non-Myth system) which
(after quite a bit of detective work) turned out to be an issue
with memory access -while the CPU was throttled down- that would
cause intermittent bit flips.  I"ll spare you all the background
on how I proved it, but disabling CPU throttling fixed it.  (The
mobo is from a vendor (EPoX) who's no longer in business, and since
it's not on all that much, this was easier than experimenting with
a newer BIOS version or different memory and/or hoping it had been
resolved before the mobo vendor died.)

memtest86+ couldn't find the error, of course, because it always
has the CPU nailed to the wall... :)


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