[XviD-devel] segmentation fault

[Christoph Lampert]

Hi,

I'll start with the end of your mail, first: 

On Sun, 3 Oct 2004, Henning Moll wrote:
> I don't know much of CPUs and that stuff, but I thought of something 
> like a hardware random number generator. Is there something like that? 

there is such a thing, but it's not used in XviD. XviD should behave 
exactly identical when run twice on the same hardware. 

> Maybe there exists a model range of my CPU which have a slightly 
> different implementation. Maybe that slightly difference is enought to 
> let your code segfault? BTW: i have an AMD XP1800+
>  
> Are you agree with my theory, that it can not be a hardware _defekt_, 
> because other (comparable) programms do not have any problems? If not, 
> why?

Definitely not. Nondeterministic errors are almost always due to hardware.
I would asusme it's either a problem with RAM (by far the most hardware
problems are RAM), or an overheaded CPU or something like that). Other
programs produce other access patterns RAM and instructions, you cannot be
sure the problem would pop up somewhere else. 

First thing I would suggest is to run a RAM checker overnight. Second
thing is to run a CPU-intensive thing (e.g. "cpuburn-in" for a while), or
possible both together. If both show no problems, we can search for a 
special defect in your CPU or so. 
I used to have a CPU with broken MMX, but that was years ago, I haven't 
heard anything like that about AMD XPs.

chl