Re: VIA Ezra CentaurHauls

[P@draigBrady.com]

Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:
> Hello
>
> We have a platform with the above processor, and we happened to have 2
> revisions thereof: stepping 8 and 10. With stepping 8 we are getting
> "random" application crashes (segfaults), sometimes with kernel-Oopses.
> The distribution is Debian-Woody.

Interesting, so stepping 10 is OK?

> I saw some messages on the Debian
> mailing list about problems with exactly this CPU, however, it was not
> related to different revisions (stepping), perhaps, the author only had
>  / tried stepping 8. The fix was to upgrade libc.

so is it a glibc bug or CPU bug?

> I've done this (to
> version libc6_2.3.1-16, but it didn't help. Any ideas?

You could search for CMOV instructions on your system,
which could cause wierdness, like:

find / -perm +111 -type f |
while read bin; do
    objdump --disassemble $bin 2>/dev/null |
    grep -q cmov && echo "$bin has cmov"
done

Note C3 Nehemiah do have CMOV (but no 3dnow).

Pádraig.