Compilation Segfaults On Athlon-XP

["M Litherland" <gpf_me at hotmail dot com>]

Hi,

I'm having issues with an Athlon PC that I can't explain and have only found 
anecdotal evidence about on the web.

My computer is an Athlon 1800xp with 512MB of DDR333 (I've tried all kinds 
of ram speeds and settings, though) on a Via KT333 motherboard 
(MSI-k7-ultra-aru).  My SuSE 8.0 with gcc-2.95.3 can compile anything 
without problems, but as soon as I try any flavor of gcc-3.2 (and gcc-3.1 
IIRC) I get segfaults that appear completely random.

My test case is usually compiling Perl 5.8.0, but most recently I have been 
trying to perform an install of Gentoo 1.4rc2.  It fails to compile groff 
when doing an emerge on it and depending upon how I set march and mcpu it 
segfaults at different spots in the build.  No combination of settings 
clears the problem up, though.  One thing that appears to be repeatable is 
that with a given set of optimizations it always segfaults in the same spot.

My first indication is that this is a ram or motherboard problem.  The fact 
that SuSE and gcc-2.95.3 works fine seems to disprove that.  Believe me - I 
have tried every ram setting in the world to see if it helps (I can make it 
worse - but not better).  If you go to google and look up "Athlon gcc 3.2 
segfault" you will see all kinds of people that appear to be suffering from 
the same symptoms.  Sadly the replies always seem to be "try different 
optimization settings" and no mention of a real fix.

Anyway - I'm desperate.  SuSE 8.0 is nice, but I'd like to upgrade and that 
means gcc-3.2 no matter what distro I go to.  Does anybody have ideas or a 
real fix for the issue?

Thanks.

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