Hi Mason,

Mason Loring Bliss wrote:
> > I hate to say it, but these are the symptoms of either faulty memory
> > or a faulty cache. Nothing happens when you're not running any
> > processes, because the memory isn't used much then.
> 
> I thought I had some bad RAM, but it seems very likely that softdep caused
> the symptoms I was seeing.

I still don't buy this completely, yet. Are you sure that your mainboard
can cope with 128MB-DIMMs. Is it possible to put 4 32MB sticks
in there (from work? :-)? If this system is not stable,
then we should go bug hunting in the softdep code.

> For example: I though my 128 meg PC100 stick was bad, so I took it out and
> popped in two 32 meg sticks from work. Everything ran fine, confirming the
> bad RAM. Then, recently, I bought another 128 meg stick, and the machine
> started blowing up again. It seems a bit like having too much memory makes
> softdep go insane. With 64 megs of RAM, I was stable. With 128, I was
> extremely unstable.

Sorry, but I forgot: What happens when it's unstable?
Will the kernel crash? Have you got a backtrace?

  Guenther