[CentOS] Is it better to rebuild or update my notebook for 4.4

[William L. Maltby]

On Sun, 2006-09-03 at 22:57 -0400, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
> Wow!
> 
> With all the conversations here, and some things on my system, I am 
> seriously thinking of taking another drive, install 4.4 on it, and then 
> move my /home partition (I planned for such eventualities by putting 
> /home on its own partition).

I have had 10 panics since installing 4.4. All "Unable to handle kernel
paging request at virtual address...". Tried using the tricks that
seemed to help on 4.3 discovered by others and a couple by myself. Set
swappiness to 0, disabled swap entirely w/o setting swappiness, disabled
with setting it, enabled swap with swappiness 0, ... am now trying
swappiness 10 and swap enabled.

Sometimes, I'm just in the middle of editing or browsing the forum or
doing mail and rigor-mortise sets in. Eyes swivel left and there are the
dreaded blinking LEDs.

Other times machine is idle (like while I eat dinner) and I touch the
keyboard to wake it up and it does it. I've posted to the list asking if
I should bugz it here or RH or ignore... because I did my googling and
see that the problem is known and unfixed through -15.

I use this unit for workstation only and it is not bleeding edge stuff.
Epox vt8237/kt-880 based (8KRAI PRO model) mobo, radeon (DRI enabled
since having it disabled produce no stability) AMD Athlon PR-2200
(1.8GH), 768MB non-ecc 2.5 CS, no overclocking, dimm voltage +.2v,
memtest86 assures me all is good.

I see no correlation between room temperature, barometric pressures,
time of last dump taken (mine, not the machine's) or any other
environmental factors.

>From watching these lists and the forums, I say if you are a
workstation, just proceed carefully. If you are stable now, may want to
wait. If you do install, have a backup.

I'm doing *nothing* advanced or difficult. Just built this new ws to
replace the prev that had mobo go bad. Just want stability and
reliability. I tell you this only to allay concerns that maybe I'm doing
some weird things to cause this.

The only "non-sanctioned" thing I'm doing is enabling DRI for my radeon.
It worked fine on <=4.3 and has not affected the frequency or nature of
the OOPS I've experienced.

> 
> <snip stuff that I can't help with>

HTH
--
Bill