Re: GCC tickling obscure hardware bug or...?

Quoting Scott Reese <sreese_at_codysbooks.com>:

> Hello all, I'm rephrasing my previous question to reflect new findings
> in my situation in the hopes that someone may have an idea of what's
> going on here (see thread "Internal compiler error in
> reload_cse_simplify_operands" from earlier this week).
>
> In a nutshell, I have upgraded my machine to a PIV 2.4 GHz processor on
> a VIA P4B 400 motherboard with 512 MB Samsung 2700 DDRAM.  I have a 300
> Watt power supply with a ball-bearing fan and a Seagate 40 GB HD.  The
> problem I'm having that I did not see with my PIII is that I'm getting
> intermittent internal compiler errors when attempting to compile
> anything (again, see previous thread for an example).  I even did a
> fresh install of the system yesterday in order to rule out something
> random getting hosed causing problems with my compiler.  Through
> experimentation, I've found that toggling the CFLAGS from -O to -O2 or
> vice-versa works around the problem (actually, I've had greater success
> leaving my CFLAGS set to -O2 -pipe and occasionally bringing them back
> to -O -pipe when I run into an ICE and then setting them back again).
> My hunch is that some hardware bug is being tickled by gcc somehow.  I
> don't think it's the standard "broken hardware" thing because I've not
> received any signal 11/7/4 errors at all and the system runs
> wonderfully.  So far it's been up for over 24 hours, compiling ports and
> running without a hitch.  The only strangeness is the compiler's
> behavior.  Also, I should mention that I added
>
> options DISABLE_PSE
> options DISABLE_PG_G
>
> to my kernel config but the ICE's still persist, though they seem to be
> less frequent now.
>
> Attached is my dmesg, please let me know if anyone would like any more
> information about this or if you have any idea what might be going on
> here.
>
> Thank you,
> Scott
>

Whenever I've had problems like this, it's been either bad memory, or bad memory
settings in bios. I'd check both of those things.

Ken