Bug#147183: I suspect hardware problems
I've seen weird stuff happen on my system, and the stuff described here
looks similar. (My problem was data errors due to insufficient power supply
capacity. This usually caused segfaults. The solution was to lower the CPU
clock frequency.)
The problem seems to be that tar crashes or something when run from dpkg,
unless tar's code is already in the disk cache. (This is the only
difference that running tar a few times beforehand could cause, that I can
think of.) If disk caching is making a difference, caching of the .deb
might also be making a difference maybe relevant to the problems
extracting control files).
Kurt> Now that you mention it, the machine *is* acting somewhat strange; so far
Kurt> it's frozen twice in the middle of reading man pages.
Random hangs are very indicative of hardware problems.
Pekka> Sounds to me like an eccentric kernel bug
If so, it's probably in the ide or SCSI hardware driver Kurt is using.
>> your system is fundamentally screwed up
Kurt> Always a possibility. Any way for me to check this?
Use very conservative settings to try to avoid hardware errors. Don't
worry about performance for now. What you want to do is see if things
change when you give the hardware a large margin of error. If that makes
the problems go away, you can try to figure out what's going on so you can
get decent performance without errors from your system.
If you using an IDE system, try using hdparm to turn off some IDE features.
For starters, try without DMA. You might also want to use ide-smart to ask
your disk how it's feeling :) Your IO system might have occasional errors
when reading and writing simultaneously. This is especially likely if you
have disks on separate IDE channels. (However, I haven't heard of this kind
of problem on SMP i686 chipsets. Crappy i4 and 586 and chipsets had these
kinds of problems.) Try underclocking your CPU/RAM.
--
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@llama.nslug. , ns.ca)
"The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours!
Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack
my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BCE
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