On Sunday 10 September 2006 23:59, Mikus Grinbergs wrote:
On Sun, 10 Sep 2006 21:22:06 +0200 Anders Johansson
wrote: On Sunday 10 September 2006 16:26, Mikus Grinbergs wrote:
My reason for posting is that an idle priority program, heavily floating-point intensive, reported a computational glitch (from which it was able to recover) just about the time 'zmd' started. I'm posting this to alert the SuSE developers to check that 'zmd' is not happening to affect the hardware involved with floating point.
I find this extremely hard to believe. zmd doesn't use any particular kernel drivers, so it shouldn't have any influence on any hardware at all
Does it hurt to look extra hard for anything unusual?
If you're looking in the wrong places, yes it can, because it involves wasting time. Other user space programs simply can not cause this type of error. It is either a hardware problem, a bug in the kernel, or in the program reporting the error. Your reasoning is known as "cum hoc ergo propter hoc". This was known as a logical fallacy already by Aristotle. There has to be some causality involved.
My system runs at 110% (sic) 24/7, and has for months in its current configuration. I did not notice any previous unexplained occurrences. And if it's heat or bad memory, why have no problems shown up in the two days (of 110%!) since what I described.
If it's something that's only just starting to go bad, you might not see another problem for 6 months. Or it may be some really obscure race condition in the kernel that only gets triggered once in a blue moon.