Re: Signal 11 FAQ
On Tue, 26 Mar 1996, Mike Orr wrote:
> There is a Signal 11 FAQ on the web, believe it or not, which goes
> into great detail about this problem. However, I lost the URL.
> Does anybody have it?
All I got in terms of faqs is the gcc-faq, which says:
Gcc is probably the biggest memory hog you're likely to run on your
machine and it will surely eat up a lot of your RAM. Usually a fatal
signal 11 will mean some sort of parity errors in your RAM or other
hardware faults. I had this once when `cc1' got corrupted due to a
race condition and bad blocks on my hard disk. There have also been
reports that overheating chips, (not french fries), can also produce
such errors. And watch for poor IDE controller/drive combos that
are being run faster than the standard 8MHz AT bus clock. These
can give the same errors by causing corruption of the swap space.
Usually, a signal 11 (segmentation violation) means that a process
tried to access memory out of its process space, or tried to write
into a read-only location. Sometimes, this signal is caused by
software bugs, not by hardware faults (or your system would hang
repeatedly, because the same thing happened to the kernel). With
gcc 2.3.3, some people could reproduce a lot of "signal 11"'s.
> One of the points in the FAQ is that DOS programs are not very
> demanding on the hardware, while Linux, especially gcc, pushes the
> hardware to its limits. In that sense, one of the side effects of
> gcc is that it is a good memory tester.
Except that more than memory is tested. Quite a few hardware defects
(and misconfigurations) can cause a signal-11 :(
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# sbolt@xs4all.nl # Steven Bolt # popular science monthly KIJK #
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