Segfaults

Devin Carraway aqua at atlantic.devin.com
Mon Feb 14 13:45:10 PST 2000


On Mon, Feb 14, 2000 at 08:37:56AM -0800, ME wrote:
[...]
> (I have seen many of the following lead to seg faults depending upon the
> application being used, and hardware combination. There are web pages "out
> there" to help you diagnise these.)
> 
> A short list:
> Over-heating of hardware: memory, cpu, bus
> Over-clocked CPU beyond operating limits
> Over-clocking of motherboard speed
> Library files trashed
> Applications being run are buggy
> Applications are corrupted
> Applications or services attempt to write aoutside kernel allocated memory
> space.
> System over-heating

	The CPU was a PPro 180, so AFAIK it wasn't overclocked; heat I can't
attest to -- overheating of any of the listed components could induce this
sort of thing.  The segfaults occured on one particular instance, where the
box would segfault on any command -- my speculation is that the kernel gets
the idea that the memory is full or bad, or something goes wrong with the
alloc routines, causing allocs to fail; fork() entails some alloc, so init
or the shell can't start anything new, resulting in a largely unrecoverable
mess.

	On two prior attempts the unit first panicked repeatedly, and the
second time oopsed, gpfed or panicked (can't recall which).  This was
fairly late in a Debian Slink install using a 2.0.38 kernel, everything
having gone swimmingly up to that stage.

	It's remotely possible that it's simply a problem with this specific
PPro board (Tyan Titan Pro; I've got one and never saw a problem, but that
was in SMP, Nancy's is UP), in which case it'd be worth attempting an
install with something 2.2-based (e.g. redhat) to see if that breaks.  If
not, then Debian's potato bootdisks are in testing now and might be usable.


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