Re: Weird coincidental PAX crashes

On 05/13/14 15:39, Joshua Kinard wrote:
> On 05/10/2014 09:43, Anthony G. Basile wrote:
>> On 05/10/14 07:39, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
>>> On 05/10/2014 07:14 AM, Joshua Kinard wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I think I ran into this, too, in 3.11. It takes a few days of uptime before
>>>> it happens.  Running 3.13.x now on my x64 machine and haven't ran into it
>>>> again.  So I second the suggestion to upgrade your kernel.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I couldn't come up with a better idea, so last night I upgraded
>>> everything to hardened-sources-3.13.6-r3.
>>>
>>
>> Unfortunately I don't know what the "this" is because that trace stripped
>> all symbols --- at least in kernel land.  In useland its pretty obvious:
>> refcount overflow detected in: syslog-ng.  So some syscall initiated by
>> syslog-ng is hitting up against the overflow.  An strace might tell us what
>> syscall, but it might be hard to go from there to where in the kernel the
>> overflow happens.
>>
>> Not to sound like a snotty dev, but please open bugs with these oopses so we
>> have a record in bugzilla.  Email just buries this info.
>
> For me, I never had an actual oops.  Just a note in dmesg that pax was
> killing command-line processes at random.  Running services didn't seem to
> be affected, but I could go run grep or something and it'd just abruptly
> terminate.
>
> Kinda hard to file a bug on that and not have it closed as WONTFIX :)
>

That's not true.  I take many approaches here and often don't find the 
underlying problem.  At the very least, I have a window of "bad 
versions" even if I don't trace down why they are bad so I know what to 
safely stabilize.

-- 
Anthony G. Basile, Ph. D.
Chair of Information Technology
D'Youville College
Buffalo, NY 14201
(716) 829-8197