Random signals in {build,install}world recently?

[Don Lewis]

On 21 Oct, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 11:45:21PM -0700, Terry Lambert wrote:
>>I've noticed a lot of bad problems with Hynix memory lately; your
>>mileage may vary.  At Whistle we had a problem with memory with Gold
>>contacts, and didn't have any problems with the ones with Tin.
> 
> A good rule of thumb is to make sure that the finish on the DIMM
> contacts are the same as the ones on the DIMM socket - both gold or
> both tin.  Note that whilst gold doesn't oxidise, it's fairly easy
> to make a gold coating so thin that it's gas permeable allowing the
> underlying metal to oxidise.

Mixing tin and gold can cause galvanic corrosion.  You can also have
connection problems due to the buildup of tin oxide on the gold surface.

I had memory corruption problems on my Athlon UP system that I tracked
down to a memory timing misconfiguration.  My memory was rated for a CAS
Latency of 2.5, but the motherboard BIOS in "auto" memory configuration
mode set the timing to 2.0.  When I manually configured the memory
timing, the errors went away.  The memory errors would show up as random
file corruption in "make buildworld", and I also saw errors on one of
the last tests that memtest86 performs.