What's new in Linux 3.7

You might recall that I had multiple motherboard replacements over the last 2 years. Or not, after all you have a life too.

Anyway, while I replaced motherboards because of electrical surges and blown transistors, I didn't replace the CPU itself. $200 more would have made it worth just throwing the whole thing out and starting over.

But now with the newer kernels I'm getting kernel errors. The internal kernel error traps are catching them, and forwarding them to "kerneloops", says a pop-up window at the upper right of my GUI.

I've noticed only two things that fail:

1) Virtual Box. Every time I have tried to run a virtual machine since I last swapped mobo after the transister explosion, the system crashes and requires a hard reset.

2) Kernels newer than 3.4.4. I like trying the latest/greatest, and up until 3.5 had no trouble. Good thing I don't uninstall the earlier one until I'm sure the latest is working, and both 3.5 and 3.6 would lock-up within minutes.

As much as I would like to "try swapping the one component that hasn't changed yet", the CPU itself, it's a $200 crap shoot. I'd rather get my car's engine serviced.

I'd say do a Memtest86+ first. RAM is by far the easiest and cheapest thing to test.

I'd also run cpuburn (http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=cpuburn) and verify that your processor isn't simply overheating, in which case you may just need to replace your heat sink compound or get a new fan.

I had a CPU overheating problem on a laptop that I resolved by blowing a couple years' worth of dust out of the heatsink/fan area.