Everything randomly generates .core files

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Eric Schuele
> Sent: Friday, November 12, 2004 9:34 AM
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Everything randomly generates .core files
>
>
> Hello,
>
> I'm having some difficulties with 5.3-RELEASE.  I have made a fresh
> install from the iso image I downloaded.  Formatted the entire drive,
> just to make sure it was clean.  I have installed everything of interest
> via the ports tree.  But many things seem to fail randomly.  I can use
> xfe for a while, then blip its gone.  pptpclient is the same.  Fluxbox
> generates .core files as well... but its never shutdown on me.  xprop
> has generated a few too.  Doesn't seem to be any one app.
>
> I'm new to FreeBSD (and *nix in general)... so I have no idea where to
> begin investigating.
>
> I was previously using 5.3-BETA7 and did not have these problems.  The
> only thing I did different this time was to make things from the ports
> tree instead of pkg_add everything.
>

You probably have a bad CPU cache on your motherboard.  The solution is
to use that machine for some Windows system and get a different PC.

What happens with the beta code is that it's compiled with debugging
switched on, for obvious reasons.  The production code is compiled
with debugging off, as well as a lot of other go-fast optimizations,
once again, for obvious reasons.  Some of these optimizations make use
of funny tricks like making loops small enough to fit in the CPU cache
so that the loop executes 10 times faster, etc.  All of this now means
that your hardware has to do some real work for a change, instead of
loafing along like it does under Windows.  Some hardware cannot take
this and will cry Uncle.

You probably would find NT4 Server bluescreening a lot on that same hardware
for the same reasons.  W2K by contrast, was slowed down by poorer,
slow scummy coding because Microsoft knew it would be run on a lot of
substandard garbage grade hardware.

Ted