Re: parted 1.5.4 crashes gnumach

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Fri, Oct 12, 2001 at 08:39:26PM +0200, Neal H Walfield wrote:
> When you say that you are running it as a normal user, does the normal
> user have access to the device or are you using a file store?

Th user had read access to the device /dev/hd0.

> I am
> also interested in seeing exactly what commands you executed and what
> the geometry of the drive is.

"parted" and then "check 1".  The geometry as seen under GNU/Hurd on one
disk is:

Disk geometry for /dev/hd0: 0.000-4887.421 megabytes

Not very helpful.  Anyway, the geometry of the disks as detected by the
kernel is: 662/240/63 UDMA

The other disk has also a geometry, but I have to reboot to find out how GNU
Mach sees it.  Linux reports it as a 5605/255/63 (physical 89355/16/63)

> Also, have you tried Parted under
> GNU/Linux?  If so, what kind of results are you getting.

The check itself, as far as it runs, seems to work ok.  I get the same
warnings about free space at the end of the partition etc as in GNU/Linux.
In GNU/Linux, nothing else happens (no crash, no error).

> Finally,
> could you give a more detailed explanation of what crashing GNU Mach
> means: are you brought to ddb, are any errors sent to the console?

The error is different each time, the crash itself spurious.  I am quite
certain that random data in the kernel address space is corrupted.  The
symptoms are page faults, assertion failures and hangs in appearingly random
places (schedular, virtual memory handler, etc).
 
> Parted only uses the store interface; nothing terribly special.

Seems that there is an access pattern that makes GNU Mach run wild.

I forgot if I mentioned this in my other mail: OSKit Mach doesn't crash.

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de