Re: Segmentation fault in dpkg and aptitude
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 10:44:42PM -0700, Bill Wohler <wohler@newt.com> was heard to say:
> You hit the nail on the head. I ran memtest86+. The original block of
> memory came out clean. The new Mushkin memory had thousands of errors.
> Never seen that before.
>
> Wonder if that was related to the earlier issues I had with
> aptitude/apt-get/dpkg? Maybe not since I hadn't seen the segmentation
> violation in any of them after running apt-get -f install twice. But
> maybe... Let's see if my workaround works for David K Jackson.
Glad to hear you found your problem. Memory errors are pretty random
and I suspect that you just were lucky after you ran apt-get -f install.
In particular, apt tools rely a lot on memory-mapped files with internal
pointers, so they would tend to be hit especially hard by bad RAM sticks.
However, if all the data that the program uses is cached in good RAM,
you should be able to run it without any problems. That would be my
guess about what was happening.
Daniel
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