Re: 2.0.20 mo dame

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Tittsler <jwt@example.com> writes:

    Jim> In article <m0vAUNr-00001OC@example.com>,
    Jim> turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)
    Jim> wrote:
    >> I'm having problems with 2.0.20.  In particular, I'm getting
    >> lots of unreaped zombie processes, and 'df' hangs when the
    >> zombies start

    Jim> 2.0.20 seemed okay on my machines, but I didn't run it very

I searched around in the logs, and discovered that the scsi errors
started showing up every day at about 6 am.  I also got some errors
from a cron job that started about 1 hour earlier (it's a stats
program that analyzes my Web logs---between a nice level of 10 and
about 11MB of logs---I haven't cleaned them up recently :-)---it takes 
a long time to run).

Anyway, that stats program was written in C, uses lots of memory from
the heap, and is from my pre-ELF days.  I recompiled it with GCC
2.7.2, (and ignored a huge number of warnings about implicitly
declared functions, etc) and it has now run twice under Linux 2.0.20
with no zombies and no accesses to non-existent partitions on my 2GB
SCSI drive (which is what was causing the kernel panics and probably
the zombies, somehow---anything that did a buffer flush to disk: 'sync',
'df', and I assume process terminations---seemed to hang and become a
zombie).

Moral: if you've got any old a.out programs hanging around, you might
want to update them to ELF.

-- 
                           Stephen John Turnbull
University of Tsukuba                                        Yaseppochi-Gumi
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences  http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com
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