14.3.1. Linux crashes randomly

Question:

On my board, Linux crashes randomly or has random exceptions (especially floating point exceptions if it is a Power Architecture® processor). Why?

Answer:

Quite likely your SDRAM initialization is bad. See UBootCrashAfterRelocation for more information.

On a Power Architecture®, the instructions beginning with 0xFF are floating point instructions. When your memory subsystem fails, the Power Architecture® is reading bad values (0xFF) and thus executing illegal floating point instructions.