Fwd: Re: [vox-tech] debian woody to sarge upgrade = dead xserver: solved

[Ken Bloom]

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 15:12:51 -0700
Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:

> Quoting Ken Bloom (kabloom at ucdavis.edu):
> 
> > I don't think that's correct. Signal 11 is better known as SIGSEGV,
> > and it is a segmentation fault usually caused by a programmer
> > dereferencing an uninitialized pointer (or a deleted pointer). It's
> > entirely a programmer error.
> 
> Well, congratulations on encountering so little bad RAM.  ;->  Our
> experience differs.
> 
> Quoting (selectively) a small piece of the SIG 11 FAQ:
> 
>  QUESTION
> 
>    Ok. I may have a hardware problem what is it?
> 
>  ANSWER
> 
>    If it happens to be the hardware it can be:
> 
>     * Main memory.
>     [...]

My main experience with segfaults, when I've cared enough to figure out
what was going on, has been when I've been writing C++ programs that
used new and delete. If you're going to debug a segfault, you need to
debug for a software problem first, and you need to debug for it
exhaustively to make sure it's not a software problem - that includes
sending strace/ltrace/valgrind/whatever output to the developer
and asking them what they think. *Then* you can conclude it's a hardware
problem.

These days, I've mostly been using Java for development. I can't wait
for Java 5.

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