Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2003 00:31:47 +0100 From: Bernd Walter <ticso@cicely12.cicely.de> To: Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org> Cc: ticso@cicely.de Subject: Re: New alpha 5.x bug Message-ID: <20031104233146.GL42463@cicely12.cicely.de> In-Reply-To: <20031104231848.GA72581@rot13.obsecurity.org> References: <20031101103955.GA42891@rot13.obsecurity.org> <20031104031740.GA67484@rot13.obsecurity.org> <20031104124826.GH42463@cicely12.cicely.de> <20031104175552.GA70699@rot13.obsecurity.org> <20031104221251.GJ42463@cicely12.cicely.de> <20031104221826.GC15210@freebie.xs4all.nl> <20031104230040.GK42463@cicely12.cicely.de> <20031104231848.GA72581@rot13.obsecurity.org>
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On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 03:18:48PM -0800, Kris Kennaway wrote: > On Wed, Nov 05, 2003 at 12:00:40AM +0100, Bernd Walter wrote: > > > > Hmmm.. the package builders are Miatas right? > > > > > > Are they using a PCI add-in ethernet card? > > > > > > I'm thinking of the Miata's rather fragile DMA stuff in the Pyxis > > > core logic chip. > > I don't think the corruption happened during network transit. For > example, they're pushed to the server via scp, so data corruption of > the ethernet packet would cause it to bounce off scp's integrity > protection. Well - this should be handled at TCP level by just dropping the packet and waiting for retransmit without the application ever to know. But if the DMA corrupts unrelated data. However - it sounds unlikey to not corrupt other kind of data as well. The question is what kind of bug this is to only trigger on the port cluster. vm/pipe sounds reasonable to believe for this kind of corruption, but it never happened for me. Possibly I'm not pushing vm that much. I wonder if setting vm.idlezero_enable=0 has an influence - this will not change the danger of this bug, but if it changes sympotoms might give a good indication of the direction to search. -- B.Walter BWCT http://www.bwct.de ticso@bwct.de info@bwct.de
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