What the heck is a bus error?

Lincoln Peters lincoln_peters at hotmail.com
Sat Mar 23 13:05:38 PST 2002


>From: ME <dugan at passwall.com>
>Reply-To: <talk at nblug.org>
>To: talk at nblug.org
>Subject: Re: What the heck is a bus error?
>Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2002 01:52:04 -0800 (PST)
>
>If your booting workstations are running out of memory (you mentioned 32Mb
>on client workstations before with no swap yet), you can get errors like
>this too. Though, if you get bus errors as a result of being out of
>memory at startup, you may want to look to trim down things at startup for
>the netbooting clients.

It's 64MB of RAM, not 32MB.  And these errors appear as early as "Mounting 
proc filesystem"!

>
>As for compiling kernels for optimized for older CPU, and using them on
>newer ones (say optimize (?) for 386 or 486 and use on Pentium, Optimize
>for Pentium and use on PPro or Pentium III, or Pentium MMX and use on
>Pentium III, I have not seen problems with this yet. (I have seen problems
>with optimizing for more advanced CPU and running on older CPU chips.)

Well, I'll see what happens if I compile a netbooting kernel for a 386 and 
one for a Pentium III.

>
>What things are still being init-ed?
>Client machine can probably drop much of their logging, as well as most
>(if not all) of their console based terminals (more memory savings) if
>they dont need any inetd services, why start inetd? (You may have these
>all removed.)

I haven't even made a netbooting machine start up to the point where it can 
run anything beyond what's shown in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit!

>
>Many (possibly most) /sbin tools are compiled as static system bins, and
>are less efficient with memory when compared with shared objects/memory
>savings than apps that can load shared libs and be more efficient with
>memory usage. Perhaps the startup scripts are calling several startup
>items that are big memory users.... (?)

Is the mount command really that big a memory user?
Even if it's not related to this problem, it does sound like a good idea to 
re-compile the /sbin programs to use shared libraries and conserve some 
memory.  Anyone know how to do that on RedHat 7.2?  Should I just download 
tarballs of all the programs in /sbin and manually re-compile them?

>
>Do something with virtual memory (if you have not done this yet) and see
>if these errors go away....

I would try that if the errors were not occurring so early at boot time.  I 
do have the system set up for virtual memory, but the NTFS module is not yet 
available.  However, I should have enough memory to get a usable system at 
runlevel 1 (so I can install the module), shouldn't I?

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