First off, thank you to everyone who responded-- your input helped me
figure this out. I wanted to send this to the lists so others might
benefit.
As it turns out, the problem appears to have been solely heat related.
I ended up installing a vanilla 2.4.20 kernel with smp for 386 (ie no
pentium or athlon optimizations), without acpi, but with apm as a
module. I disabled power management in the BIOS, and boot with only
apm=power-off for kernel command line arguments. Notice I did NOT use
noapic. The kernel boots fine and has no APIC errors (though there is
that errata #22 message). I then installed lm_sensors 2.7.0 and
i2c-2.7.0 so I could read the temperature.
The temperature readings for the 3904 transistor are the ones to use,
since they are closest to those in the BIOS. I called tyan and spoke
with someone on the phone, and he said that the system will lock up
around 60C (not the advertised 80-90C, because the sensor is reading air
temperature). With the case all closed up I ran two kernel compiles,
and two 'top -d .01' instances all at once. Then I ran 'sensors' every
30 seconds, and sure enough, the computer got near 60C and crashed. I
took the sides off the case, and used an oscillating fan to blow air
into the computer and rebooted. 'sensors' now shows the temperature
between 39-43C and has been running the above stress test for several
hours (it has never run it for that long).
So now I will be buying some additional fans and making sure the air
flow is good in the case. I also whole heartedly recommend using
lm_sensors. It REALLY helped with debugging this issue.
Jamie
-- James Strandboge Targeted Performance Partners, LLC Web: http://www.tpptraining.com E-mail: jamie@tpptraining.com Tel: (585) 271-8370 Fax: (585) 271-8373- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/