[lug] Seeking thoughts on this crash

[Gary Hodges]

With RH 7.2:

Two months ago I replaced a plain Athlon 1.4 with an OEM Athlon XP 
2600+.  I first flashed the BIOS to a beta version released by Gigabyte 
so the CPU would be recognized correctly.  Before and after installing 
the new CPU I ran a large process to see what improvement I would get.  
The new CPU ran at near 100% for ~60 minutes during this test without 
trouble.

Installed SuSE v9.0:

Today I was processing data using the same program as above and the 
machine locked hard with the following messages displayed in the xterm's:

-----------------
Message from syslogd at space at Tue Dec 30 11:43:43 2003 ...
space kernel: CPU 0: Machine Check Exception: 000000000000004

Message from syslogd at space at Tue Dec 30 11:43:43 2003 ...
space kernel: Bank 0: c410400000000136 at 0000000009b37000

Message from syslogd at space at Tue Dec 30 11:43:43 2003 ...
space kernel Bank 1: d400400000000 at 000000001fd97140

Message from syslogd at space at Tue Dec 30 11:43:43 2003 ...
space kernel Bank 2: f60020000000017a at 000000001ad96080

Message from syslogd at space at Tue Dec 30 11:43:43 2003 ...
kernel panic: CPU context corrupt
------------------

I've done some google searches on "Machine Check Exception" and some 
results indicate that "It could be a hardware related problem."  There 
were very few hits on "CPU context corrupt."  I was able to repeat the 
lock-up three out of four tries.  It typically takes 3-5 minutes for the 
machine to lock up.  A complete run that I was trying takes about 15 
minutes.  I guesss I'll RMA the CPU unless I get some other 
suggestions.  Thankfully I paid $2.99 for a 90 day warranty.

Gary