Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Fri, 8 Sep 2000 10:33:52 +0100 | From | Malcolm Beattie <> | Subject | Re: Flavours of deceased bovine |
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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/
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