bus error

[Bill Moran]

David S. Jackson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> First, forgive me if this doesn't come through devoid of html.  I'm
> normally a mutt user, but I'm trying evolution.  We'll see how it goes.
> 
> I'm on a $.%-STABLE system, and I've been experiencing some disk errors;
> I did an fsck -y on the slice where /usr lives.  (I forgot it was /usr
> when I did this.)
> 
> Since then, I've received various "program terminated with signal 10. 
> Bus error." problems.  Examples are vim and xinit.  As you can imagine,
> I'm eager to fix this so I can get X back.  Looking at the core files
> left behind by X and by vim, I see the following:
> 
> *** snip ***
> GNU gdb 4.18
> Copyright 1998 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> GDB is free software ... blah blah ...
> This GDB was configured as "i386-unknown-freebsd" ...
> (no debugging symbols found)...
> Core was generated by 'vim'.
> Program terminated with signal 10. Bus error.
> Reading symbols from /usr/X11R6/lib/libgtk12.so.2...
> (no debugging symbols found)...done.
> Reading symbols from /usr/X11R6/lib/libgdk12.so.2...
> (no debugging symbols found)...done.
> Reading symbols from /usr/local/lib/libgmodule12.so.3...
> (no debugging symbols found)...done.
> Reading symbols from /usr/local/lib/libglib12.so.3...
> (no debugging symbols found)...done.
> Reading symbols from /usr/local/lib/compat/pkg/libintl.so.2...
> (no debugging symbols found)...done.
> Reading symbols from /usr/libexec/ld-elf.so.1...(no debugging symbols
> found)...done.
> #0 0x2815a26b in memset () from /usr/libexec/ld-elf.so.1
> (gdb)
> 
> *** snip ***
> 
> That was for vim.  Here's for xinit:
> 
> *** snip ***
> GNU gdb 4.18 
> blah blah blah
> Core was generated by 'xinit'.
> Program terminated with signal 10. Bus error.
> Reading symbols from /usr/X11R6/lib/libXmu.so.6...
> (no debugging symbols found)...done.
> Reading symbols from /usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.so.6...
> (no debugging symbols found)...done.
> Reading symbols from /usr/libexec/ld-elf.so.1...(no debugging symbols
> found...done.
> #0 0x2805826b in memset () from /usr/libexec/ld-elf.so.1
> (gdb)
> *** snip ***
> 
> I typed all this by hand, so hopefully I have it correct.
> 
> Notes:  this problem is about 48 hours old.  So far I've tried remaking
> ld-elf.so.1 from /usr/src/libexec/rtld-elf and copying ld-elf.so.1 from
> /usr/obj/usr/src/libexec/rtld-elf to /usr/libexec/, but even from single
> user runlevel, this was not allowed.
> 
> I've thought about remaking the system, but I'm thinking that if
> ld-elf.so is broken, things probably wouldn't make correctly for a new
> system.  Am I wrong on that?
> 
> I've also thought about reinstalling a binary distribution on top of all
> this (upgrade from a new 4.8-stable CD), but that's an even bigger risk,
> I would think.
> 
> So, what would you gurus do?  What should be my next step for trying to
> salvage my system here?

Can you rule out hardware problems?  Possibly a disk going bad?  I hope
you've been making backups.
You didn't run fsck while the partition was mounted, did you?  If so, umount
the partition and run fsck until it reports no errors and see if that fixes
things.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com