On Sun, 8 Jan 2012, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
Could you point me in the direction of such a livecd please?It looks like no one is making an official Debian livecd with kFreeBSD any more (alas). But it should be possible to grab par2 and its dependencies and run them in the debian-installer[1] rescue environment, for example. Alternatively, there seem to be some other non-Linux live environments, such as [2].
Thanks. I tried GhostBSD, which didn't have par2 included and couldn't run executables from my hard drive, and Knoppix which was an i386 kernel (albeit very recent 3.0.something), so also couldn't run my amd64 par2 from my hard drive. A rescue environment may be the way forward, but how do I get a recent kernel and par2 onto it? I have to admit I am not well-versed in setting that up.
I think I have spotted another condition for the bug to be triggered. I ran par2 with a different configuration, and it worked. I think par2 does interleaved word by word access to n memory areas, where n is configurable. When it crashed, n was 1400, and when it worked n was 140. I also noticed the program worked much faster when n was smaller. Now, the number of TLB entries on my processor is 1024, so it is quite possible that every single word access causes a TLB miss.
Matthew -- "Interwoven alignment preambles are not allowed." If you have been so devious as to get this message, you will understand it, and you deserve no sympathy. -- Knuth, in the TeXbook