Problems since 5.3-RELEASE-p15

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Tuc at T-B-O-H wrote:

>The only pattern I see is that it starts all of a sudden, goes for
>a little while, EVERYTHING you try to do fails, I get the 
>/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: top: Shared object has no run-time symbol table
>type errors, and then all of a sudden it goes about its merry way.
>
>	I'm not sure what a "run-time symbol table" is, and if it gets
>rebuilt at any time, or is something thats part of the program, or what....
>But its not like one time it behaves one way, then another time it behaves
>another. 
>
My description would be hazy at best, so hopefully someone more au fait 
will chime in.  But I can definitively state that, no it isn't something 
that gets rebuilt every so often.

However, if you run ktrace on a simple program like ls: ktrace ls
then do a kdump | less, you will see that after finding ls, 
/libexec/ld-elf.so.1 is the first thing accessed.  So, when things start 
working again, /libexec/ld-elf.so.1 is magically fixed, which just makes 
no sense.

I assume there are no other messages obvious errors in /var/log/messages?

One final thought is that it could be the disk.  You could try 
installing smartmontools and see if the disk thinks it is OK -- though 
of course it could be the controller.  But in such a case I might expect 
other errors.

>I'd think if it was a memory issue, it'd be something other than 
>the same "Shared object..." thing each time. One time it'd be a bus error,
>another time a "this isn't executable", etc....
>  
>
The classic bad memory symptoms are periodic reboots, and random 
segmentation faults.  The latter is particular to bad memory, I would 
say.  The fomer can have other causes.

It's the intermittent nature of the fault that really makes me think 
hardware.  Am I right in remembering that you upgraded to 5.4 and still 
had the same problems?

--Alex