process exiting strangeness under 5.2.1-RC2

[Robert Watson]

On Sun, 15 Feb 2004, Jesse Guardiani wrote:

> These messages continued forever on my primary console until I went to
> single user mode. Stock kernel. Booting with hint.apic.0.disabled=1. 
> 
> uname -a: 
> 
> FreeBSD trevarthan.int.wingnet.net 5.2.1-RC2 FreeBSD 5.2.1-RC2 #0: Thu
> Feb 12 16:28:31 GMT 2004
> root at wv1u.btc.adaptec.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC i386
> 
> I've since been unable to reproduce the problem. Still, it stikes me as
> rather bad that a process was looping on core dump. I've still got the
> kdeinit.core if anyone is interested. 

Well, I wouldn't preclude a kernel bug, but at a first glance it sounds
like a bug in KDE.  Signal 6 is SIGABRT, and is typically generated as a
result of an application calling abort() after failing an assertion.  The
incrementing pid in the log suggests a series of processes being spawned
off by a parent process, each one dying, and then the parent trying again. 
I've seen KDE behave somewhat badly when the connection to the X server
dies, so perhaps kicker is trying to respawn the DCOP server.  A stack
trace from the core wouldn't hurt, but may not be very useful without
debugging symbols for the binary and libraries.  You might want to search
the KDE mailing list archives and see if they mention this problem.

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research