Last Updated on February 6, 2013 by nghiaho12

Last year I bought myself a small HP Pavilion DM1 for traveling overseas. On paper the specs look great compared to any of Asus EEE PC offering in terms of processing power and consumption. It’s got a dual core AMD E-450, Radeon graphics card,  2GB RAM and about 4-5 hrs of battery life. In reality? I’ve had to take this laptop in for warranty repair TWICE in a few short months. First time was a busted graphics chip that only worked if I plugged in an external monitor. The second time was a faulty hard disk singing the click of the death. Both were repaired within a day, so I can’t get too mad. But when I finally got around to installing all the tools I need to do some number crunching under Linux, this happens …

Yes that’s right, Octave crashes on a matrix multiply!!! WTF?!?

I ran another program I wrote in GDB and it reveals this interesting snippet

My guess is it’s trying to call some AMD assembly instruction that doesn’t exist on this CPU. Octave uses /usr/lib/libblas as well, which explains the crash earlier. Oh well, bug report time …