I'm not sure what people necessarily mean by crashes under load.  When I
was using a later BIOS in this machine, *heavy* load would reliably crash
the whole system in a manner of minutes, typically.

I reverted to an older BIOS some time ago, and crashes have largely gone
away.  However if I run xmms for an hour or so, playing music continuously,
it will eventually crash.  This is not very heavy work, but does keep the
system doing some work frequently.

I have also occasionally noticed that builds from pkgsrc or system sources
abort with either unexplained coredumps (resuming works fine) or else
abort with strange, garbled "no such file" messages.  (The garble implying
to me that the file names are corrupted somewhere.)

My source trees live on NFS, as do my music files, if that makes any
difference.


Dropping into a debugger is not a real option for me, since I use this
AMD64 box as my main workstation (so it's in X when the system crashes,
as a rule).  I have no other machine set up for remote/serial debugging,
so that's not really likely to happen, either.


...just some additional data to perhaps help narrow down the culprit(s).


-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/