Hi all,

Lately, I've gotten several errors with QMC. Starting a new WU resulted in a signal 11. QMC seems to be the only project that is bothered with this (also running EAH and SETI). But a posting there didn't solve it.

My questions:
-Are there other known problems running BOINC on Knoppix 3.3, or with a Linux Knoppix 2.4.22-xfs kernel?
-I'm running without a HD, could that have caused the problem?

Thanks,
Bert

Lately, I've gotten several errors with QMC. Starting a new WU resulted in a signal 11. QMC seems to be the only project that is bothered with this (also running EAH and SETI). But a posting there didn't solve it.

My questions:
-Are there other known problems running BOINC on Knoppix 3.3, or with a Linux Knoppix 2.4.22-xfs kernel?
-I'm running without a HD, could that have caused the problem?

Signal 11 is Segment Violation, which means that application tried to access part of memory which (according to kernel) does not belong to it. There are a number of reasons for getting it, but the most frequent ones are:

• software bug in application such as use of un-initialized pointers or something alike. This would explain why you only seem to get these for QMC application.
  
• hardware failure such as failing RAM. Perhaps also some overheated chip such as CPU or north bridge. But if this was the case, you'd probably get these problems while using any application, not only QMC.
  

You may want to check your machine using memtest86+ just to be on the safe side regarding RAM chips or any other relevant hardware part of your computer.

I'm assuming here you're not overclocking or something.

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Metod ...

Lately, I've gotten several errors with QMC. Starting a new WU resulted in a signal 11. QMC seems to be the only project that is bothered with this (also running EAH and SETI). But a posting there didn't solve it.

My questions:
-Are there other known problems running BOINC on Knoppix 3.3, or with a Linux Knoppix 2.4.22-xfs kernel?
-I'm running without a HD, could that have caused the problem?

Signal 11 is Segment Violation, which means that application tried to access part of memory which (according to kernel) does not belong to it. There are a number of reasons for getting it, but the most frequent ones are:

• software bug in application such as use of un-initialized pointers or something alike. This would explain why you only seem to get these for QMC application.
  
• hardware failure such as failing RAM. Perhaps also some overheated chip such as CPU or north bridge. But if this was the case, you'd probably get these problems while using any application, not only QMC.
  

You may want to check your machine using memtest86+ just to be on the safe side regarding RAM chips or any other relevant hardware part of your computer.

I'm assuming here you're not overclocking or something.

I've run memtest: after 23 passes no errors. So, it doesn't look like there's a memory problem.

At QMC, it's claimed that a lot of similar WUs are processed correctly. They guess it could be incompatibility between their app (compiled with Suse 9.3) and Knoppix 3.3. Any thoughts on that?

And indeed, I'm not overclocking.

At QMC, it's claimed that a lot of similar WUs are processed correctly. They guess it could be incompatibility between their app (compiled with Suse 9.3) and Knoppix 3.3. Any thoughts on that?

This is possible. Most of projects provide applications linked dynamically maning that necessary libraries get loaded run-time whichever are available on target system. Which can be different than the ones used at compile-time. Normally this shouldn't be a problem as there are some hooks not to use too different libraries. But bothing is fail-safe here.

This is why I'm ranting around (not too loud though) to make projects provide statically linked applications meaning almost everything is included from the libraries available at compile-time. Not everything, but the missing bits are mainly used for communication between project app and BOINC CC so these shouldn't matter.

Back to the subject: I don't have any other idea.

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Metod ...