Mel Gorman: Kernel Spanner

For much of the last 30 days or so[1], I've been writing a paper as part of college work. A large part of that was running tests 24 hours a day over the course of 20 days[2]. On the day they finished, I reran one of the tests (crypto from the specjvm2008 suite) with more debugging information as I wanted to confirm a suspicion but the machine spontaneously rebooted. Not good, but the room was cold, nothing was on serial console or in the logs so I thought it might just have been a power flicker. Rebooted again an hour later so I popped the case to see had something become unseated or some other problem. There were a few hints as to what the problem might be;

Hint 1 ..... memory modules are usually in a nice neat line together, maybe it somehow fell out

wrong

Hint 2 ..... heat sinks should not melt off





Sometimes a cold room with case fans just isn't cold enough if you run that machine hard enough for long enough. Makes for bad surprises but a funny picture. Module is pretty hosed but easily replaced at least.

[1] Minus 7 days during which I was skiiing for the first time in Austria. Skiing rules
[2] Based on mainline kernel 2.6.27 installed on Debian Lenny Beta from Dec 2008 using an AMD Phonem based machine for x86-64 and a Terrasoft Powerstation for ppc64.