Kevin McLauchlan writes:

On Tuesday 14 January 2003 11:07, Mark Gray wrote:

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Kevin McLauchlan writes:

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Funny, in 7.3 and 8.0 -- same machine -- I was able to leave anything running for months without problems. I mean, I could *make* problems by trying to configure stuff, but if I just ran programs or just let the machine sit, it was happy and content and never crashed.

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This is almost certainly a problem with the 8.1 kernel then -- install k_deflt-2.4.19-174.i586.rpm from the SuSE updates like several others suggested if you have not already.

That has to be an explicit download and rpm invokation? Or can that be done as part of a YOU update?

Unless you have a broadband connection -- I would not try YOU -> the kernel is 21,891,527 bytes -- but you SHOULD be able to use YOU (I only have a modem so I downloaded the total of 1,039,556,096 bytes of updates on their site using ftp.)

Those who have installed the new kernel... did it go in smoothly? Or did you have to track down a hundred dependencies?

Piece of cake --> it solved the problem for me -- zero crashes since I installed it 20 Dec 2002.

Anyway, it begins to sound like something to try. Is there a possible downside? I mean, given that I'm crashing at least every second day, a new kernel would be only an improvement, right? :-) And it *is* SuSE tested... oh... wait... that's what they said about the current kernel... ;->

The problem appears to have been caused by an experimental patch intended to speed up reiserfs and ext3 disk writes -- the "barrier" patch -- I have noticed no difference in speed, in fact a certain annoying hesitancy when doing tab filename completion in a large directory seems to be a lot better since upgrading -- do it -- you won't miss a thing.

Thank you all. I'll come back with my results. It would be nice to post a "SOLVED" in front of this one. /kevin