2.1.6 breaks procps-1.01

Brett Hollon (bhollon@mhaao.inhouse.compuserve.com)
Thu, 31 Oct 1996 19:30:26 -0500

Well, I decided to try living dangerously and installed linux-2.1.6.
Most everything runs pretty well (so far) but I have noticed that
procps-1.01 is broken. Ps seg faults when run with the -l switch. I
did a little investigating, and discovered that the problem is in
find_func() in libproc (ksym.c). The process that it is trying to
look up is "nfsoid". It may be significant that NFS is being loaded
as a module in my kernel.

I had a look in /proc/ksyms and noticed that there are no symbols
there labelled for nfs (this is also the case in 2.0.24). The address
of the wait channel is 0xc284155e. The relevant portion of /proc/ksyms
follows:

c2856024 init_aout_binfmt [binfmt_aout]
c283a004 ne_probe [ne]

If I were to hazard a guess as to what has happened, I'd say the NFS
code has changed to sleep somewhere in the NFS code itself (from some
place in the general kernel) and the lack of entries in the /proc/ksyms
file for that section is causing procps to exhibit a bug that has gone
gone undetected until now.

If this is a known bug, then I am sorry for wasting bandwidth. It isn't
listed in the Documentation/Changes file.

Even if the bug is in the procps package, it has pointed out what seems
to me to be a problem with NFS, modules, and the /proc/ksyms file.
Shouldn't there be entries in the /proc/ksyms for the NFS code?

I hope this is somewhat helpful,
Brett