Re: Buffer corruption (2.1.81)

Bill Hawes (whawes@star.net)
Mon, 26 Jan 1998 09:31:24 -0500


Martin von Loewis wrote:
>
> When compiling a kernel, it reported an error in a file that compiled
> fine twenty minutes ago. When looking at the source, I see that 4 bytes
> are magically changed, so I suspect the buffers were corrupted. The
> corrupted word was at offset 13300 of the file. I'm running
> 2.1.81+linux-2.1.81.diff.gz. There were no syslog reports.

Hi Martin,

I would guess it's a problem with a stray pointer corrupting a buffer, just as
there are sporadic reports of dentry list trashing. As long as we continue to
get occasional oops reports with wild pointers, we can't rule out the possibity
of the pointer hitting kernel memory and causing silent corruption problems.

I wish there were a way to track down this sort of problem in a systematic way,
other than just hoping that continued code review and improvement will catch the
error.

Regards,
Bill