Subject: *REPRODUCIBLE CRASH* with 2.0.12 kernel (earlier kernels also)

From: Randy Gobbel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 1996 15:39:17 -0700

After hearing all this stuff about viruses and password security I started
getting nervous, so I grabbed Crack 4.1 off of the net, compiled it, and
started running it over the password files of all the systems whose security I
care about.  On the very small password file of my personal machine it
completes normally, but when I try to run it on a relatively large password
file, I get a system freeze after running for around 45 minutes.  The freeze
appears to be completely reproducible.  I thought at first that the problem
might be related to the beta-test X server that I'm running, but it happens
whether or not X is running.  When I restart after one of these freezes, I get
exactly the same message from fsck every time:

Deleted inode 281219 has zero dtime.

I just made up the number, but in any case it's the same inode every time.
There are no other error messages.

Has any else seen anything like this?  There's clearly a bug somewhere, but I
don't know if the problem is more likely to be in the kernel or in my
hardware.  I haven't seen any other indication of any hardware problems.  My
system is a 200 MHz Pentium Pro, with an Adaptec 2940UW SCSI adapter, a
Quantum Atlas 4.3 GB hard disk, and 80 MB of main memory (if you haven't
looked at RAM prices lately, you should).  I started with Debian 1.1, and have
kept the kernel up to date since then by applying patches as they appeared.

Other than this list, is there an "official" place to report problems like
this?  I'm leery of posting to the newsgroups, because when I did recently, I
was hit by a flood of junk email--the reason for the anti-spam paragraph at
the end of this message.

-Randy
-- 
http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~gobbel/

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---

From: [email-masked] (Bruce Perens)
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 96 22:11 PDT

From: Randy Gobbel <[email-masked]>

> but when I try to run it on a relatively large password
> file, I get a system freeze after running for around 45 minutes.

Watch its memory usage, and see if it is using up your swap space.
It's probably dying when memory usage gets to a particular value.
You might be able to get around the problem by adding swap space.
Of course it should fail more gracefully than hanging the system.

> Deleted inode 281219 has zero dtime.

We have allocated the inode in /usr/src/linux/fs/ext/ialloc.c, but we
have not gotten to use it for something (or that something did not get
its block written from the RAM cache to disk before the crash). Harmless.

If you want to help track down a kernel bug, please subscribe to
[email-masked] . They can handle it a lot better than
we can.

	Thanks

	Bruce