Re: 2.6.36, make oldconfig broken

Gene Heskett
2010-10-23T02:18:42Z

On Friday, October 22, 2010, Ken Moffat wrote:
>On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 02:20:17PM -0700, Randy Dunlap wrote:
>> On 10/22/10 13:08, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> > But I'll be interested in what you get. Its stuff like this that
>> > have made me wary of downloading the kernel images in .bz2 formats,
>> > too many times I have had to go back and get the .gz version because
>> > the unpacking of the .bz2 upchucked and silently threw away a subdir
>> > tree, and only a fresh download fixes it, blowing it away and
>> > unpacking the bz2 again will only fix it occasionally. I started
>> > with the tar.gz of course this time.
>>
>> Curiouser and curiouser.
>> I always download & build from .bz2 tarballs, with no problems.
>
> On my own x86 machines, I can remember seeing apparently corrupted
>.tar.bz2 files twice in the last eight-or-so years. In each case,
>untarring reported an error, it didn't silently lose files and
>directories, and in each case the problem was failing memory.
>
> In Gene's case, I recommend running memtest86 or better ('+') as
>soon as possible. On my problematic x86 boxes, memtest86 started to
>report errors within a minute or so of starting. If it runs for a
>whole cycle, the memory is probably ok.
>
>ken

I haven't done that in 6 months or so, but will the next time I reboot.
The last time I had any errors from memtest+ was about 18 months back, and
a thorough re-seating of the memory seemed to fix it. Maybe its due again?

Thanks for the reminder Ken. One tends to 'get in a rut' in the later
years, forgetting such.

I will report what happens when I do.

--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
To the landlord belongs the doorknobs.