[18412] in Athena Bugs
Garbage output on Linux machines taking updates
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Fri Oct 13 18:09:41 2000
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 18:09:36 -0400
Message-Id: <200010132209.SAA02285@egyptian-gods.MIT.EDU>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: bugs@MIT.EDU
Sometimes (always?) when a Linux machine takes an auto-update, it will
start by spewing a bunch of output to the screen. This output does
not appear in update.log. The output includes some text strings like
filenames which suggest that it might be the contents of an
executable.
Presumably this happens when update_ws does a kill -FPE of dm, but I'm
not sure.
I've seen this happen on nephthys.mit.edu, a fairly cruddy e-machine,
and Bill has seen it on his machine, which I believe is a GX110. When
I saw it, there were also some beeps, suggesting that it wasn't merely
a problem of video memory corruption.
