From owner-freebsd-hackers  Fri Aug  7 18:39:51 1998
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To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>
cc: Ollivier Robert <roberto@keltia.freenix.fr>, FreeBSD-security@FreeBSD.ORG,
        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Does this mean we have another breakin? 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 07 Aug 1998 15:17:43 MDT."
             <199808072337.RAA13808@lariat.lariat.org> 
From: David Greenman <dg@root.com>
Reply-To: dg@root.com
Date: Fri, 07 Aug 1998 18:35:55 -0700
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>We were about to do it AGAIN. Now we're holding out some hope that it's
>just a bug -- though perhaps the same one that's crashing us when we try to
>back up.
>
>In any event, I just received private e-mail stating that at least one
>person has encountered VM problems in -stable under heavy CPU loads when
>the swapper kicks in. According to the message, they cause corruption of
>file modification dates. 

   Corruption is probably not the right word. There might be a bug where a
page is seen as modified when it isn't, causing the modify date to get
updated. The only way to be certain is to compare the binary with your
backup (e.g. if installed from CDROM, then with the copy on the CDROM). I
haven't personally seen this happen in more than a year, so if the bug is
still there, it must be fairly rare.

-DG

David Greenman
Co-founder/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project

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