Kernel panic in 2.1.127: login respawns

aaronl@vitelus.com
Tue, 24 Nov 1998 07:14:39 +0000 ( )


A friend and I were playing with a 486SX running 2.1.127 (UP) and ran
accross a deadly trick. We were entertaining ourselves by respawning the
login program as fast as the machine could handle: holding down ^D at the
login prompt. Originally, we did this for a few seconds on tty1 untill
init would not allow it to respawn for 5 minutes becuase of its rapid
reexcecution. We didn't let this ruin our so-called fun and switched to VC
2. We did this for every single virtual console except for three (which we
accidentally skipped). We switched back to three and held down ^D. Uh,
dang. Kernel panic. It printed a stack trace (about a paragraph).

Every time we tried, we were able to reproduce it, usually it only took
two virtual consoles to burn out before the kernel paniced. Instead of the
original paragraph, it usually prints out screenfulls of junk. Sometimes
the screen even turns funky colors :).

This box is a 486SX/40. Its got a NCR scsi card, and that's about it.
There are 16 megabytes of ram, so memory should not be a problem unless
some of it is bad. I predict that this is the symtom of a bug in the
kernel, since as long as my friend has had it (month or so) it has not
crashed and has run pretty reliably. It is always possible that some
hardware is crashing it.

Idea: I'm going to try this on my 2.1.129 PPC G3. Be back in a second.

Update: None of my computers (2 Pentiums running 2.1.128 and 2.0.36 and 1
PowerPC running 2.1.129) are affected by this. That suggests that this bug
is either a hardware problem on that particular 486, only in
2.1.127, or only present with the hardware configuration of that machine.

Would anyone who has a few spare moments please see if they can generate
the same results by holding down ^D until init geys mad on each virtual
console? Thanks.

Aaron Lehmann

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