Hello,
I have a very frustrating stability problem on my Workstation
where I run a Slackware64 Current installation. The problem is,
many programs just crashes, after they started, or after a quit
short while. Affected are Firefox, Thunderbird, Krusader, Amarok,
Konsole, and many other programs. The second problem is, if I
downloaded a bzip2 archive, it is corrupt. I downloaded many
archives, from other mirrors, and all corrupt.

I had installed, the Multilib-packages, thought they would be
the reason for the problems, and installed the standard packages
of glibc and gcc. No changes. Then I upgraded the kernel from
2.6.33.4, to 2.6.35.6. (Compiled it myself) Nothing better.

Here is a strange dmesg-output:
I've installed slackware64 with my pxe-server, but if I formatted
a partition with ext4, many packages could not be installed, he
says they were corrupt. But if I formatted the partition to ext3
everything could be installed, without errors.

Attached are some crash-logs, from KDE, maybe they could help.

Please help me, thank you for any advice.
Best regards, Jack.

Attached Files

	akregator-20100929-173600.txt (3.4 KB, 9 views)
	amarok-20100929-165706.txt (8.8 KB, 8 views)
	konsole-20100929-165559.txt (1.3 KB, 16 views)

I would try a memtest on the machine: maybe the easiest way to run it is from an ubuntu livecd (it's between the boot options).

Most probable is a bad RAM - in the higher regions.
Does that computer have 4GB or more of RAM installed? If you ran a 32-bit OS before and never experienced problems, then the bad RAM may be in the part which can not be addressed by the 32-bit OS.

Eric

@Jack128: limit the accessed memory on installer and system boot and see if everything is OK. You can run a x86_64 system even with a 512M memory, right?

EDIT>

mem=bytes

e.g., mem=4000000

This option specifies to the kernel the highest memory address to use (specified in bytes). Normally Linux uses all of the available memory. This feature can be useful for simulating machines with less memory or debugging cache problems on machines with lots of memory. As an experiment, try booting your machine with less memory, say 2MB, to highlight the difference memory makes. As another experiment, see what happens if you lie and tell Linux you have more memory than is installed...

The system have 6GB RAM installed, witch is relative new.
Not 4 months ago. But I run the memtest this night, I never
thought of that. Thank you all for your fast replies, and
your advices =)

To access more, than 4GB of RAM, You need to build Your own kernel with "NUMA Memory Allocation and Scheduler Support" enabled (sorry, I don't know, what options are used with default slackware kernel, because I'm using my own kernel since first installation of my system <Slack 12.0> and I've blacklisted kernel packages in slackpkg config file :> ). IMHO this should resolve Your problems. Be sure also to use SLUB alocator instead SLAB. It's better in smp arch - I'm using it for a long time and have no issues

And the most important - be sure, if You don't have any 3rd party software installed! If You can, do fresh install of Slackware64.

If You encounter more instabilities, so please - check Your RAM with memtest twice, or more...

Good luck

You do not have to build a new kernel in Slackware64 if your computer has more than 4GB of RAM. The 64-bit Slackware can use a lot more than 4 GB out of the box.

Eric

Thx Eric for correction - I'm not interested with the kernel packages from slackware since I'm doing it myself

So, the problems are definitly involved with one of two things:
- physical memory corruption (or incompatibilies within different memory chips),
- 3rd party software.

There is no other possibility, in my opinion.

Thank you all, I have run long tests on each
module. One of my G.Skill module, have many
defect blocks. After I removed it, everything
works fine.

Thanks for your fast advice. =)
Best Regards, Jack.