Programs/Scripts in Bash randomly killed

discostu · Guru Joined: 01 Nov 2002 Posts: 333

When I'm executing things in bash, sometimes it executes and sometimes it gets killed. There seems to be no pattern in the executions

_nms · n00b Joined: 29 Nov 2002 Posts: 5 Location: Umeå, Sweden

I'm having the same problem. In fact, I registered a user in this forum just to be able to solve the problem in question.

The problem started occuring last week (around November 18th to 20th) a few days after reinstalling Gentoo (a from-scratch upgrade from 1.2 to 1.4). The only major differences in the system compared to before the reinstallation are gcc and related packages (gcc upgrade from 2.95.3 to 3.2-r1).

The programs receive SIGKILL, apparently from the kernel. The amount of free memory in the system seems to be strongly related to the problem, since closing programs taking up a lot of memory makes the problem go away for a couple of minutes, although I've had programs receive SIGKILLs with +100MB free system memory. Also, I have been experiencing strange losses of free memory, sometimes up to 4K every one or two seconds, without any process using more memory. Related?

rac · Posted: Fri Nov 29, 2002 9:51 am Post subject:

My first instinct is hardware, but could you comment on your CFLAGS and gcc version?
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_nms · n00b Joined: 29 Nov 2002 Posts: 5 Location: Umeå, Sweden

Considering I haven't changed any hardware at all, it's unlikely that it is caused by hardware problem.

Here are my compiler flags:

really · Guru Joined: 27 Aug 2002 Posts: 430 Location: nowhere

i too have encountered this problem once, i dunno exatcly how i solved it, think it was something about the kernel prioritie limits and such things.
as i recall, shm and /mnt was involved :/
grsecurity restrictions and so on...
you could check that.
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rac · Posted: Fri Nov 29, 2002 8:46 pm Post subject:

You could try either upgrading to gcc 3.2.1 or taking off some of your explicit code generation compiler flags. GCC 3.2 appears to have some silent code generation bugs with esoteric optimizations.
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_nms · n00b Joined: 29 Nov 2002 Posts: 5 Location: Umeå, Sweden

I thought I might mention (in case it wasn't obvious from my first post) that this is not a Bash-related problem. Starting phoenix, sylpheed-claws and other programs from Fluxbox' root menu fails sometimes too, and xscreensaver fails to start the savers when it activates from time to time.

I will try to upgrade gcc and remove the unnecessary compiler flags and see what happens.

EvvL

If anyone is even reading this thread anymore (else this is just for future reference in the search engine).

I had the same problem when I first installed 1.4 RC1, Nano is right tho, its the grsecurity patch thats making the kernel kill random processes. I don't have time to find out which option in the patch that is doing it. But I turned off the buffer overflow protection and the user restriction stuff and that fixed it.

If anyone else has anytime and wants to narrow it down a little more please post

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discostu · Guru Joined: 01 Nov 2002 Posts: 333

I recently upgraded my kernel from linux-2.4.19-gentoo-r5 to linux-2.4.19-gentoo-r9. Might this have something to do with it?