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