As I said before, I don't think it is the "vsyscall=emulate" that caused the problem, because linux-image-4.19.0-5-amd64 required that kernel option, and it worked fine. I am pretty sure my current kernel requires that option too - I haven't tried removing it.bruce wrote:The function gettimeofday and other syscalls like it are used by FAH (and presumably by Matlab). Nobody is going to eliminate them from their code just because your distro cannot support them.
There is something specific to linux-image-4.19.0-6-amd64 that's causing FAH (and possibly Matlab) to fail. I don't know what it is, I have no idea how to diagnose it. I looked at the change log, and it appears that the only change that might be related is spectre v2 bug fix. I am just hoping this weird problem doesn't happen again. People saying that my laptop's hardware was failing did make me slightly sad. I am just glad that this whole nightmare is over, and my machine is folding again.