On Sun, Sep 17, 2000 at 04:00:06PM +0930, Greg Lehey wrote:
> What you *should* do before sending out a reply like this is to check
> whether it's really in the FAQ or not. It is
> (http://www.freebsd.org/FAQ/troubleshoot.html#AEN1570):
There's a lot of people who are quick to step up to the podium and
proclaim that all these signal elevens are caused by bad RAM, or bad
RAM settings. It *could* be a pointer arithmetic problem.
The FAQ ought to comment on this, and from recent personal experience,
the number of people who respond to these just quoting the FAQ gets
more annoying each time, mainly because it's something that doesn't
need to be said on the mailing lists... again.
In this case, it is possibly bad hardware, so maybes it's a fair call,
then again it can be caused by, e.g. freaky optimizations in gcc...
So could we change the text (something like, but better worded than
the following) in the FAQ, e.g. :
Q: My programs occasionally die with Signal 11 ( or 10 ).
A: Signal 11 errors are caused when your process has attempted to
access memory which the operating system has not granted it access
to.
This could be caused by a number of different circumstances :
a) Most likely, if you're developing it yourself it's buggy
code. (We've all been there!)
b) If it's a problem with part of the base FreeBSD system,
it might be buggy code, but more often than not these problems
are found long before us general FAQ readers get to use these
bits of code.
If these problems are only affecting you, it's probably bad
hardware.
In the case of a) you can use a debugger and find the point
in the program which is attempting to access a bogus address
and then fix it. [ you probably already know this if you're
a programmer! ]
In the case of b) You need to verify the settings on your
motherboard. Checking for hardware you might be running slightly
out of spec, too fast, or mismatched hardware. Often setting
memory wait states too short will trigger random signal 11's.
An overclocked CPU will possibly also exhibit strange or similar
symptoms.
Try running some memory testing programs, or do a make buildworld
if you have the full source available for FreeBSD (after a few
successful buildworlds it's probably safe to say the hardware
is okay.).
See the SIG11 FAQ (LINK) for more information.
That's my idea for a rough draft anyway. I'm clearly illiterate
though, please don't flame me for that!
Steve,
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