Segmentation faults and floating point exceptions

[Dragonbane]

I am getting segmentation faults and floating point exceptions when doing the gmake on QT 3.1.1, redhat 7.1. I found a post that said seg faults were hardware related.....are the floating point exceptions hardware also? It wouldn't supprise me if it was...I'm dealing with a 3 year old laptop.

[eggman]

Dragonbane,

Both segfaults and fpe's can occure from either hardware or software reasons. Most often they occure from software problems.

The generality of your post makes it imposible to help you define where your problem is. You may want to see if other procesees are haveing the same problems. General operations of the machine (kernel, init, getty's etc running) will not generate the same load as compiling a large code base like QT. To make a decent load you may want to try running something very CPU and i/o intensive. openssl --speed would be a decent CPU load as would doing a few instances of ssh-keygen with the keysize set very large 2048bt+. If you find that you are able to cause segfaults and fpe's in other procesees it is likely that you have some damaged hardware. Possibly damaged registers in the CPU (checked your fan?) a damage memory module etc etc.

A problem likeyou describe could be caused by a lot of things, but here is some stuff they may help you understand it.

http://csit1cwe.fsu.edu/doc_link/en_US/a_doc_lib/aixprggd/genprogc/floating-point_except.htm

http://www.scd.ucar.edu/docs/chinook/floating-point.html

http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-linux-e/2000-Nov/0460.html

Cheers,
-Egg