re debugging possible hardware problems in article r rslinnnv senator bedfellow mit edu jfc athena mit edu john f carr writes i m running linux on an eisa system and i m having what i think are hardware problems it could be software but i don t see why i d be the only one having trouble i d like some advice on how best to debug this the symptom when i try to build gcc i get unpredictable and unrepeatable results sometimes a o file is not in valid a out format recompiling the file gives me a valid binary sometimes the compiler aborts or dumps core but works fine when run again with the same input compiling the same source files with the same arguments gives slight differences in a few object files note that linux unlike many other systems does not put timestamps in object files so compiling twice should give bit identical results i also have occasional filesystem corruption on my scsi drive but that could be caused by using development software it could also be related to my problems compiling the compile problems are not caused by disk problems i get the same results whether i do my work on an ide or scsi disk i ve set the memory speed and cache write speed to the recommended values recommended for what dos that is a junk i suspect the external cache but i have no real evidence for this the motherboard is a nice super eisa with kb write back cache and a dx mhz processor what i m looking for a system test program to run under dos or linux linux gcc fire up gcc to compile libc and kernel at the same time running x r suggestions about the cause of the problem bad memory bad motherboard bad cache suggestions about how to debug the problem change wait state of ram turn off turbo change bus speed swap ram h j
