[Sderby] Finding a hardware fault

[John Talbut]

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Hi

I appear to have a hardware fault that is causing occasional segfaults.  My
initial problem was that I could not get a kernel to compile.  I was referred to
http://www.bitwizard.nl/sig11 and following steps there it appears that it is a
hardware fault.  Iceweasel (i.e. Firefox) also segfaults fairly consistently if
I try hopping around YouTube.

My system is a fanless hush Mini ITX with a VIA Nehemiah processor.  I am using
 Debian testing.

I thought CPU overheating might be a problem, but extra cooling (blowing air
over the external cooling fins) did not make any difference.  The internal
voltages seemed to go rather low, so I changed to a more powerful power supply.
 I have changed the RAM.  I have run memtest86+ overnight and it shows no faults.

So I am looking for suggestions as to what to do next.  There is not much more I
can change apart from the motherboard, but I would want to be sure there was a
fault on it before I did so.

I have tried running strace on Iceweasel but there does not seem to be anything
consistent about what happens before it segfaults.  My guess is that it may not
be Iceweasel itself that is hitting the hardware glitch.

Is there some way of tracing all of the last, say, 20 operations before there is
a segfault?  Or any other way of diagnosing the hardware fault?

Any ideas?

John
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