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Re: Segmentation faults



On Wed, 9 Jan 2002, A.J.Bink wrote:
> >>  I've just finished installing debian potato m68k on an LC 630 (a
> >>  68LC040, no FPU).  Everything goes pretty well, except for the fact that
> >>  after I've booted i get the following message when loading inetd:
> >>
> >>  "Starting inetd superserver:
> >>  INIT: Id "1" spawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes"
> >
> >Unfortunately, you have a broken 68LC040. There's some bug in this
> >processor in the Floating Point Exception-handling and Memory-management
> >part of it. If you're interested in the specifics, please search the
> >archives of the newsgroup comp.os.linux.m68k (for instance at
> >groups.google.com), it's the most frequently asked question there.
<snip>
>   IMHO has the complaint from init  about 'respawning too fast' 
> nothing to do with the processor!

That alone, no. "respawning too fast" means that a server, started by
init with the 'respawn' option fails to start properly.
Since it's got the 'respawn' option, init will automatically and
immediately restart the server when it exits, whether successfully or
not. Since this particular server segfaults at startup, it dies
immediately, so init will go in loop trying to restart it all the time.

Since we don't want the system to go down because some server refuses to
start, init will simply stop for five minutes trying to start this server.

Indeed, when the message 'respawning too fast' appears, this can be
anything. In this particular case, though, it's the processor being
broken.

<snip>
> order they are executed I found the offending script/program.
> As far as I can remember the "1" stands for a script or program. I 

No, it doesn't. It stands for an inittab-id (the first field in a line in
inittab). If you do a 'grep "^1\:" /etc/inittab', you will find the
offending program.

> renamed the offending file and the message did not reappear.

If you really did that, the message will most certainly reappear. What
you probably did was throwing the offending line in comment or out of
inittab.

> In my 
> hurry to prevent people from buing new processors I did
> not yet find the name of the script/program, but when I find it I will
> post it.

Which will probably not help him, since his processor is broken. I
conclude this not only from the fact that init complains about a service
respawning too fast, but also from the fact that random software dumps
core with messages as "Segmentation fault" and "Bus error". When this
happens on m68k, you've got a buggy processor, and that's exactly what
happens here.

-- 
wouter dot verhelst at advalvas dot be

"Human knowledge belongs to the world"
  -- From the movie "Antitrust"



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