Hardware Troubleshooting Tests Needed

[AeroIllini]

I suspect I have hardware problems.

I have been getting randomly timed and non-reproducible segfaults, freezes, and X failures. The non-reproducible nature of these problems make me think my hardware is to blame.

Sometimes, when an application I'm running randomly segfaults, there is a message in dmesg which states "unable to handle kernel paging request."

Recent changes to system: I installed a new graphics card (nVidia drivers, works flawlessly aside from other failures) and replaced my 512MB RAM stick with two 1GB RAM sticks. I have installed both of them seperately, and they are both recognized. I also recompiled my kernel at that time to enable HIGHMEM so I could see all 2GB of RAM.

Since I'd like to narrow down the source of the problems before I spend money on hardware, I would like to run some tests. Could you suggest some hardware tests I could run that would help me identify the problem? I already plan on letting memtest86+ run overnight tonight.

Thanks.

[guduri]

Here is a nice article on checking the stability of your hardware for linux writtent by Daniel Robbins... Scripts are included in it.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-hw1/
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[AeroIllini]

I ran a few of the tests listed on that excellent page you sent me, and I discovered that it's a cooling issue. My processor segfaults when it overheats. Since I have not changed the cooling in my computer, it makes me think that this overheating has been going on for some time, and I'm worried about permanent damage to the CPU.

However, I have been meaning to upgrade to a dual-core AMD from my Pentium4 anyway, and this is as good an excuse as any. If there's permanent damage to the P4, then I'll just toss it. If not, then it's a good spare machine, once I fix the cooling issue.

So, before I plunge in, I have some questions about migration to the new processor.

I will be buying an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 2.0GHz dual-core processor and an ASUS A8N5X socket 939 motherboard to go with it. Here are my questions:

- how much will I have to recompile? I know I will have to play with the kernel options a little and recompile for AMD instead of Pentium, but will I have to recompile all my other apps? Is there an easy command in Portage to do this?
- what should my new USE variables be? (if these change, I will likely want to recompile my apps ... right?)
- can I use the MAKEOPTS variable to force GCC to utilize both cores of the AMD? can GCC even use both cores?
- what options should I make sure I enable in the kernel in order to be able to use both cores?
- is it worth my while to upgrade my BIOS to the latest rev?
- is it worth my while to go to a 64-bit architecture? can I run 32-bit apps in a 64-bit environment?

Thanks for your help so far.