TCSH exit crashing Sparc

[Lars Henrik Mathiesen]

pauln at TIRS.oz.au (Paul Ninnis) writes:
>We're having the occasional problem using tcsh on a sparc station 1 under
>SunOS 4.1
>It appears to create a data fault causing a panic condition leading to
>rebooting when a terminal user logs out (only occasionally)
>(possibly by the use of exit rather than ^D)

We had a similar-sounding problem some time ago. (I'm almost certain
it was under 4.1, but I'm not sure.) One user, and only he, could
crash the systems when logging in. At some point in his login
sequence, tcsh would perform a strange sequence of fork()s and
exit()s. (The dump showed that this was where the crash came.) But
that wasn't enough to crash the system when we tried, so we looked at
his login some more.

It turned out that he set the coredump resource limit. This somehow
made the kernel botch the fork/exit stuff. (There may be a patch by
now.) I think any limit (zero or not) would provoke the crash.

You might want to check if the crashes you see have anything to do
with the coredump size limit.

--
Lars Mathiesen, DIKU, U of Copenhagen, Denmark      [uunet!]mcsun!diku!thorinn
Institute of Datalogy -- we're scientists, not engineers.      thorinn at diku.dk