Are My RPM/Yum Seg-Faults Due to the Kernel FIle Corruption?

[Paul Dickson]

Is the file corruption problem currently being discussed on LKML related
to the RPM/Yum seg-faults I occasionally on my 300 MHz, PII, notebook
(with only 256 MB of RAM)?

I usually see the seg-faults while glibc-common is being updated during a
large update (within the first 2 or 3 files of 30+ file update).  If I
update glibc* first, that, and the following updated of the remainder
always works.  If glibc has a lot of dependency info, I can see the
/var/lib/rpm/__db.00* databases taking a hit and requiring manual
deletion to restart.

If this is true, this bug might have started before FC6 was released, but
only gets hit when memory runs low.

	-Paul

[Paul Dickson]

On Sun, 24 Dec 2006 09:16:53 -0700, Paul Dickson wrote:

>  Is the file corruption problem currently being discussed on LKML
> related
>  to the RPM/Yum seg-faults I occasionally on my 300 MHz, PII, notebook
>  (with only 256 MB of RAM)?
>  
>  I usually see the seg-faults while glibc-common is being updated during a
>  large update (within the first 2 or 3 files of 30+ file update).  If I
>  update glibc* first, that, and the following updated of the remainder
>  always works.  If glibc has a lot of dependency info, I can see the
>  /var/lib/rpm/__db.00* databases taking a hit and requiring manual
>  deletion to restart.
>  
>  If this is true, this bug might have started before FC6 was released, but
>  only gets hit when memory runs low. 
I forgot to mention the notebook is running kernel-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6
which is 2.6.18.1.

	-Paul

[Arjan van de Ven]

>  I forgot to mention the notebook is running kernel-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6
>  which is 2.6.18.1. 
the bug wasn't seen prior to 2.6.19 so I doubt what you see is related
to it...

[Paul Dickson]

On Sun, 24 Dec 2006 18:18:43 +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote:

>  the bug wasn't seen prior to 2.6.19 so I doubt what you see is
> related
>  to it... 
In the note about 2.6.20-rc2 says its been there since at least 2.6.18.3.

	-Paul

[Panu Matilainen]

On Sun, 24 Dec 2006, Paul Dickson wrote:

>  On Sun, 24 Dec 2006 18:18:43 +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
>
> > the bug wasn't seen prior to 2.6.19 so I doubt what you see is related
> > to it...
>
>  In the note about 2.6.20-rc2 says its been there since at least 2.6.18.3. 
Yup, and it certainly affects at least apt-rpm in current Fedora 5 & 6 
kernels. I've seen a bunch of crash reports (and managed to reproduce it a 
few times myself) which all are caused by zeroes in apt's cachefile where 
data is expected...

In the cases I managed to reproduce it, no rpmdb corruption was present, 
just apt's own cachefile. But as rpm uses mmap it's at least *possible* 
some of the rpm issues people see in FC6 are caused by it.

 	- Panu -

[Kevin Kofler]

I also suspect the apt-rpm segfaults which have started to appear with the 
2.6.18 kernel update in FC5 and are still there in FC6 to be a kernel bug. 
(Search Bugzilla, there's already a couple reports here, and there's similar 
reports against Debian's apt, also with 2.6.18.)

        Kevin Kofler