Calibrating delay crash

[Richard Brunelle <rbrunelle@envitech.com>]

(please put me in CC when replying)

I'm having trouble booting a PentiumMMX @ 266 MHz board with 64 Mbytes 
of RAM. The kernel crashes while in the main.c/calibrate_delay function. 
It never boot, sometimes it fails and reboot, sometimes a page fault 
occured. I tried with the kernels 2.4.21, 2.4.26 and 2.6.7 with the same 
results.

I notice that if I return before the calibration loop, the system boots 
fine. This has been tried only for testing.

void __init calibrate_delay(void)
{
    unsigned long ticks, loopbit;
    int lps_precision = LPS_PREC;

    loops_per_jiffy = (1<<12);

return; <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

    printk("Calibrating delay loop... ");
....

I look in the archive and one post points to a memory problem, I ran 
memtest86 with no error found. Now I wonder what can cause this problem, 
is it a hardware issue/timing? What can I do to investigate more? How 
the calibrate_delay loop can crash the kernel?

Thanks.