Red Hat Knowledgebase

Signal 11's and signal 7's are errors indicating a hardware error in memory or on the bus. This can be due to problems in executables or with the hardware of the system. The Linux kernel tends to make much greater use of capabilities of a system's CPU, cache, and memory. Therefore, it is more prone to faulting on marginal or defective hardware.

The first thing to do is check to see if you have the latest installation and supplemental floppies from Red Hat. Check the errata page (http://www.redhat.com/support/errata) for updates and also the FTP site (ftp://ftp.redhat.com) to see if newer versions are available. If the latest images still fail, it may be due to problems with your hardware. Common suspects are memory (RAM) or the CPU-cache. Try turning off the CPU-cache in the BIOS and see if the problem goes away. Also try swapping the RAM modules around in the motherboard slots to see if it is either slot or memory related.

The premier site on the net for this problem can be found at http://www.bitwizard.nl/sigll/.