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