Umm.. I take that last comment to mean that you _know_ you have a bad
external cache?
Quite frankly, Linux _will_ crash, spectactuarly and often (and sometimes
not so spectacularly) in the presense of bad caches. It's not as if I
could even do anything about it (unless you count "be so slow that there
is no risk of the system getting overtaxed" as a solution, and if you do
you'r eprobably running MS Windows already).
Linus