Repeated segfaults in F17

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 10/09/2012 01:46 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-10-08 at 19:16 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>> On 10/08/2012 02:15 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
>>> On Mon, 2012-10-08 at 09:46 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>>> On 10/08/2012 04:38 AM, Temlakos wrote:
>>>>> Beginning about an hour ago, I've been hit with a ton of application
>>>>> terminations. All of them say the same thing: "Signal 11 (SIGSEGV).
>>>>> Which I believe translates as "Signal segmentation violation."
>>>>
>>>> In addition to what others already wrote, check if you aren't running
>>>> out of memory (run "df" and check its output).
>>>
>>> df tells you about free disk space.
>> Yes - My fault. I probably should have written "disk space" instead of
>> "memory".
>>
>>> It has nothing whatever to do with
>>> RAM,
>> It depends. C.f. tmpfs, RAM disks etc.
>>
>>> besides which a lack of disk space (even in swap) would cause a
>>> system error message, not a segfault.
>> When running out of memory, inside of a program a malloc may fail, which
>> may cause a pointer be set something invalid, which later may cause a
>> SEGFAULT when the pointer is dereferenced.
>
> If malloc fails it will return an error rather than a pointer. Now of
> course a completely incompetent programmer might not bother checking the
> return value, hence causing a segfault when the invalid pointer is used,
> but the OP mentioned that several programs were getting segfaults in a
> short period of time.

I recall thunderbird and vlc having been mentioned.

> It's highly improbable that all of these
> (including widely used apps such as Thunderbird) are so badly
> programmed.

Well, I would not want to exclude vlc (with its zoo of highly sensitive 
and error prone libs underneath and within), thunderbird (with it's 
unstable plug-in system) from this problems.

Actually, if the OP should be using /tmp on tmpfs, any program can tear 
down anything else. I have seen "presumably innocent" compiler jobs 
tearing down firefox and or thunderbird ;)

Ralf