Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2002 01:57:49 -0800 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: <gnb@itga.com.au> Cc: <freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: kern/33637: Panic: vm_page_unwire: invalid wire count: 0 Message-ID: <002101c199bd$42f97d40$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <200201100339.OAA28995@lightning.itga.com.au>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: gnb@itga.com.au [mailto:gnb@itga.com.au] >Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2002 7:39 PM >To: Ted Mittelstaedt >Cc: freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: Re: kern/33637: Panic: vm_page_unwire: invalid wire count: 0 > > >> Any application is able to cause a kernel panic with just regular library >> calls. > >With respect to Ted, no non-root userland program should be able to >panic the >kernel. Ever. > >Yes, I know about fork-bombs, and malloc-bombs, and that login.conf can stop >them, but they should still never panic the kernel. That they do (did?) in >FreeBSD is still a (hard-to-fix) bug with a well-known workaround, not an >acceptance of the fact that panics are acceptable. > I certainly don't advocate designing an operating system that is easy for user apps to crash, I hope you didn't get that. The submitter of the PR was operating under a false assumption - that he could run any program and assume that it was impossible for it to crash the OS. This assumption is preventing him from considering all the possibilities, and failure to consider all possibilities and judge them is a fatal impediment to solving problems. I'm guessing that if this does turn out to really be a FreeBSD problem that it's going to be related to the use of the SMP kernel, and a bug in mmap. This is why I told him to boot the server on a uniprocessor kernel and see if the problem went away. But he almost immediately made excuses against this, whereupon I have no choice but to believe that the submitter is more interested in theorizing an answer to the problem than in actually testing and analyzing the results. I don't have time for that and neither does anyone else. It appears that in this PR that the submitter did not avail himself of the Diablo mailing list or support community first - which I feel is the biggest problem. If the Diablo user community and developers look at this problem and all decide that there's a problem with FreeBSD then great - let's look into it. But until then this problem could be due to a simple misconfiguration of his Diablo software. News servers are, after all, somewhat tempermental to begin with. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-bugs" in the body of the message
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