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

[Jonathan Stickel]

Ken Bloom wrote:
> 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.
> 

Well, if its new or suspect hardware, you can boot up memtest86(+).