Segfaults

ME dugan at libwais.sonoma.edu
Mon Feb 14 08:37:56 PST 2000


On Mon, 14 Feb 2000, Nancy Harrison wrote:
> Subject: Segfaults
[chop]
>   So - my question is - what else, besides bad RAM chips, causes
> segfaults? I tried checking on Deja, but most of the posts were in
> Czech, Italian or Polish <g> - I can kind of grok the Italian, but
> not the others!  I know programmers can suffer segfaults with
> bad pointers, and that a program can segfault if it tries to
> access memory it has no permission to access, but what does
> this all entail? - Grandma

(I have seen many of the following lead to seg faults depending upon the
application being used, and hardware combination. There are web pages "out
there" to help you diagnise these.)

A short list:
Over-heating of hardware: memory, cpu, bus
Over-clocked CPU beyond operating limits
Over-clocking of motherboard speed
Library files trashed
Applications being run are buggy
Applications are corrupted
Applications or services attempt to write aoutside kernel allocated memory
space.
System over-heating

(cases where files (library, or applications) are corrupt may be cause by
faulty media, hard drive going bad, buggy HD controller, bad power signal
from the wall, bad power from faulty power supply.)

Less likely (but possible):
IRQ conflicts
Multiple bus-mastering devices on PCI bus arguing over control for writing
to memory (if seg faults happen in application for heavy IO on that
device.)
Buggy memory manager

Most obvious suggestions after you check to make sure over-clocking beyond
limits (caused by the damage of heat and resistance) would be to find a
different set of install media, perhaps with a newer version of debian,
and then re-install.

-ME





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