lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2000]   [Sep]   [8]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
SubjectRe: Flavours of deceased bovine
Keith Owens writes:
> Just had an ext2 filesystem on SCSI that was corrupt. The first two
> words of the group descriptor had been overwritten with 0xdeadbeef,
> 0x00000000. The filesystem is fixed now but trying to track down the
> problem is difficult, there are 50+ places in the kernel that use
> 0xdeadbeef.
>
> I strongly suggest that people use different variants of dead beef to
> make it easier to work out where any corruption is coming from.
> Perhaps change the last 2-3 digits so magic values would be 0xdeadb000
> to 0xdeadbfff, assuming it does not affect any other code.

Nah, choose new words which stand out. There are plenty of them and
it avoids the problem of a 0xdeadb001 being decremented before being
noticed and thus confused with a 0xdeadb000. Be inventive:
egrep -x '[abcdefilos]{3,8}' /usr/dict/words
and make one up whenever needed. For example,
0baff1ed
acce55ed
decea5ed
d15ab1ed
d15ea5ed
along with multiword ones like
fee1dead
dead1055
badca5e5

--Malcolm

--
Malcolm Beattie <mbeattie@sable.ox.ac.uk>
Unix Systems Programmer
Oxford University Computing Services
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2005-03-22 12:38    [W:0.032 / U:0.124 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site