Crashing X server

2007-12-25 11:21:00

Sorry for the hugely late summary on this one.

Thanks to Stephen Boyd Gowing <sbg@fox-in.socs.uts.EDU.AU> for mailing me now

and reminding me to summarize.

While I did receive a couple of pieces of email on this, no-one provided any

information that helped solve the problem.

But I did solve it: with some trial and error testing with the user

involved, we figured out that it was dclock (the old freeware X digital

clock program) that was causing it! Once he stopped running dclock, the

problem stopped occuring.

I have not had any time to investigate it any further than that - I was

simply glad that the problem went away.

Davin.

Original question:

>Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1998 21:08:18 -0400 (EDT)

>From: Davin Milun <milun@cs.Buffalo.EDU>

>To: sun-managers@codeprof.ececs.uc.edu

>Subject: Crashing X server

>

>I have a weird problem, which I can't find the cause of.

>

>I have a user (just one, of all the users that we support, many of who have

>identically configured systems), for who X crashes.

>

>The system is a SPARCstation 4/110, running Solaris 2.6 (105181-06)

>running OpenWindows 3.6 (105633-08), and not running CDE (even though it is

>installed on the system). (Full showrev -p is attached.)

>

>The user reported that the error occurred at random, but closer investigation

>showed that it occurs either at 1am or 1pm exactly! And the crash is Xsun

>crashing with a segfault.

>

>My first thought was that some cron job was causing it, but there are no 1am

>or 1pm crontab entries on that system (nor on the server system that is its

>NIS server and home-directory NFS server).

>

>I copied that user's .cshrc, .login, .xinitrc, .Xdefaults into my account

>there, and now it happens to me on his system. (I have not verified if it

>happens if I leave my own setup, rather than his.)

>

>Note that it does not happen at EVERY 1am/pm, but only at some (random?) of

>them.

>

>When running as me, I left a root truss running on the Xsun process.

>And, at exactly 1am, it died with the following:

>

>3883: Incurred fault #6, FLTBOUNDS %pc = 0xEEEDEB2C

>3883: siginfo: SIGSEGV SEGV_MAPERR addr=0xEE5A9000

>3883: Received signal #11, SIGSEGV [default]

>3883: siginfo: SIGSEGV SEGV_MAPERR addr=0xEE5A9000

>3883: *** process killed ***

>

>I have eliminated hardware as the problem, by switching his system for

>another identically configured SS4. And the problem did not go away.

>

>

>One of the X clients that running with his standard setup is Netscape (4.05),

>but he says that thinks that it has crashed on him when he was not running

>Netscape.

>

>

>Does anyone have any clues/advice on this, as the user is becoming quite

>irrated at X crashing out from under him, and I have no real guesses as to

>what could be causing the X server to crash.


--
Davin Milun E-mail: milun@cse.Buffalo.EDU milun@acm.org
Fax: (716) 645-3464
WWW: http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~milun/

Comments

Got something to say?

You must be logged in to post a comment.