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Re: Debian has become totally unusable on my amd64 system -- no stable kernel available



On Sat, 01 Feb 2014 11:58:06 -0500 (EST), Ben Hutchings wrote:
> 
> It's not clear to me whether you were previously running an i386
> installation on the same hardware.  If so, this behaviour is very
> surprising.

No, I'm comparing to an i386 system on different hardware.
> 
> If this is a new system then I suspect there is a hardware fault, such
> as:
> - faulty memory (memtest86+ may be able to confirm this)
> - faulty disk controller
> - inadequate power supply

I may have found the problem.  This problem may be related to Debian bug
number 736892.  At last contact, the Debian package maintainer was
convinced that this is not a bug; and that everything is working as
designed.  However, new evidence documented in my last post to the bug
report now has me convinced otherwise.  I varied offline the two CPUs
which apparently did *not* get their microcode updated by means of

echo 0 >/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online
echo 0 >/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu3/online

(issued as root), and so far, the system is now stable.  I'm running
on half power, but at least the system is stable.

Of course, I have to be running a kernel that survives long enough for
me to login as root and issue these two commands before it crashes.
But once I get that far, I haven't had any problems since.  I now
think 736892 really is a bug, and that it is the cause of the kernel
crashes I have been experiencing.

-- 
  .''`.     Stephen Powell    
 : :'  :
 `. `'`
   `-


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