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Date: Wed, 30 Jun 1999 04:47:02 +0200
From: Ulf Carlsson <ulfc@thepuffingroup.com>
To: "William J. Earl" <wje@fir.engr.sgi.com>
Cc: linux@cthulhu.engr.sgi.com
Subject: Re: Memory corruption
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>  > The compiler may stop working sometimes on certain files, giving bogus
>  > error messages which I don't understand (the compiler is probably not the
>  > only application affected).  Running this program I just wrote forces the
>  > corrupted caches to be flushed or something and ``fixes'' the problems:
> ...
> 
>       This problem sounds like a cache flushing problem.  Do you also get
>       SIGILL, SIGBUS, and SIGSEGV failures?  One possibility is that the
>       icache is not being flushed on a page fault, when a page is read in from
>       disk, and the icache still has old data in it.  This could lead to a
>       cache line of bogus instructions being executed.

Sometimes when this happens I think I only get a SIGSEGV or a SIGBUS, otherwise
I get internal compiler errors.  It's hard to say since these problems are very
hard to reproduce, and I forget what happens from time to time.  I have
unfortunately not written down the results.  It sounds like this may be the
cause of the type of file corruption I have when only a little part of the file
is damaged (sounds like the problem covers both icache and dcache).  That type
of file corruption goes away after reboot.  I haven't had a chance to try this
with my discard-disk-cache program since this happens very seldom..

>       What model of CPU do you have in your machine?

I have a 133 MHz R4600 with 512kb board cache, 16kb dcache and 16kb icache.

Regards,
Ulf