On Fri, 8 Oct 2004, Mike Hardy wrote:

Slightly more on-topic, one thing that I have do to frequently is boot
with noapic or acpi=off due to interrupt handling problems with various
motherboards.

I've seen this (and made mention of it here in the past) it basically
boils down to cheap motherboards with buggy chipsets )-: Some BIOSes let
you select PIC or APIC - on these buggy ones, I stick to PIC.

Additionally, I think there have been reports of problems with raid and
LVM, and there have also been problems with SATA and possibly with
Maxtor drives, so you have may have some tweaking to do. Mentioning
versions of things (distribution, kernel, hardware parts and part
numbers etc) would help

I had problems some 2 years ago when I first dabbled with LVM. Quickly
found problems with performance and random crashes and not having time to
persue it further, left it alone and haven't ventured back since!

I'm interested to hear what other people do to burn their machines in
though...

Looks like we do someting similar... So that can't be bad! I'm sure there
is plenty cpu left over for me to do stuff like compiles, etc.

Many years ago I used to write diagnostics for compter systems - memory,
cpu, IO, etc. there were cases where the systems would pass all the diags
faultlessly for days on end, then crash 2 minutes into the application, so
theres no substitute for real life testing...

Gordon