fatal lockup, BIOS/CMOS reset?

From: Jonathan Brugge (jonathan_brugge@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Dec 10 2000 - 16:49:05 EST


I was experimenting with Hunt, a program I found. This caused some heavy
load, and my system had already quite some programs running, so I think I
got out of memory (no programs got killed, shouldn't that be done by the
VM?). Maybe it was for some other reason, but my system locked, I had to use
CTRL-ALT-DELETE. This seemed to work, my HD made some sound and it rebooted.
But then: I got a message about a bad CMOS and when I looked in my
BIOS-settings I saw they were totally reset... No HD's, date was 1/1/2000,
etc.
After setting everything to the correct value I tried to boot again and no
problem this time, not even about a partition that was unmounted
incorrectly. It seems to me that no program may EVER have a chance to change
things in BIOS/CMOS.I'm running kernel 2.4.0test11 with libc6-2.2.5 (Debian
woody, if it matters).

1: Is it possible that a program sets options in BIOS/CMOS?
2: If so, should it be possible?
3: Any other things that could cause this to happen?

I'm not sure it's a kernel-related problem, but it's something that should
never happen, in my opinion (except BIOS-flashing).

Thanks,

Jonathan Brugge

P.S.: My system: Gigabyte GA-7IXE mainboard, K7-700, 128 MB, AMD 751/756
chipset.
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