Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Thu, 6 Sep 2001 10:10:45 +0300 (EEST) | From | Mika Yrj|l{ <> | Subject | Weird behaviour / Trying to vfree() nonexistent vm area message |
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Hi,
although I'm not subscribed to the list, I thought to post this message because I ran last night into rather exotic behaviour, which could be kernel-related. I initially posted to a finnish Linux group and was recommended to duplicate the message here. A rough translation of the message follows:
I initially noticed that Mozilla didn't respond to user input anymore. Because of that, I thought to look for the PID with ps and kill it. However, ps printed just a few lines and stopped. The terminal window still received keypresses, but the output of ps didn't continue and control-c did not break the process. That started to feel a bit weird and I tried to run top. This didn't print anything and behaved in the same way as ps. I also encountered this problem with w and killall. However, I could get still process information from relevant /proc/<pidnumber>/ files. Additionally, a few lines of C which just printed out the result of getpid() call worked nicely.
Additionally, about the same time I noticed the problem an entry to /var/log/messages had appeared:
Sep 6 02:55:40 renttu kernel: Trying to vfree() nonexistent vm area (d59d4000)
I tried running "strace ps". The problem seems to be related to the following final lines of output:
getdents64(6, /* 20 entries */, 1024) = 576 stat64("/proc/864", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0555, st_size=0, ...}) = 0 open("/proc/864/stat", O_RDONLY) = 7 read(7,
After that nothing happens. I tried manually reading the corresponding file, but the same effect happens with "cat /proc/864/stat". Seems that this process (whatever is may be... can't get information about it) is the culprit somehow.
The kernel/hardware information:
[myrjola@renttu ~]$ uname -a Linux renttu.lnet.lut.fi 2.4.8 #1 Mon Aug 13 07:15:39 EEST 2001 i686 unknown
TB 1200 MHz (not overclocked), A7M266, 256 megabytes of DDR memory, Sblive!, Geforce 2MX, two IBM hard disks and HP cd-rw drive
If the possible comments would be CC'ed to this address, I'd be grateful. Also, I'm keeping the machine up and running in that state until today evening in case someone wants me to test something that could be useful in finding the cause.
-- /-------------------------------------------------------------------------\ I Fantasy, Sci-fi, Linux, Amiga, Telecommunications, Oldfield, Vangelis I I Seti@Home, Steady relationship, more at http://www.lut.fi/%7emyrjola/ I \-------------------------------------------------------------------------/
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