Messages in this thread | | | From | vinny <> | Subject | linux crashed with unchecked malloc ?? | Date | Wed, 15 Dec 1999 14:17:21 +0530 |
| |
hi all, The problem that I came across was an offshoot of a joke in humorix , where linus trovalds plays a role of a detective trying to see why a linux box crashed and failed to boot again. This is the code I wrote to see how linux handles the situation
void guess_what () { char *p = malloc (1024*1024); guess_what (); }
void main () { guess_what (); }
I compiled and ran the program once , it segfaulted , and then I ran it twice again , all the time it segfaulted as expected. But then when I checked up my hard disk space , I had 0 bytes free. To verify the same , I asked my friend to run the same code again , except he modified the malloc statement to following:
char *p = malloc (4096*1024);
This time his entire system freezed up , then init reported it has run out of memory , when we tried to login from another console , klogd said out of memory and the system just froze , allowing us no chance to kill the culprit process.
We ran the code again after hard reset , and this time we got a bus error and the program exited. When we checked up the hard disk space we found again that disk space had been gobbled up leaving a very little amount free.
Any ideas why???
vinny
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |