Re: 2.2.17 --- extreme format string weirdness in /proc

From: Jesse Pollard (pollard@cats-chateau.net)
Date: Sat Sep 30 2000 - 17:00:07 EDT

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    On Sat, 30 Sep 2000, Nix wrote:
    >Andries Brouwer <aeb@veritas.com> writes:
    >
    >> On Sat, Sep 30, 2000 at 03:09:10PM +0100, Nix wrote:
    >>
    >> > Yesterday, I noticed that netstat had stopped working on my 2.2.17 box
    >> > The reason is fairly self-evident:
    >> >
    >> > : loki:/# cat /proc/net/dev
    >> ...
    >> > : lo:%lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu
    >> > : eth0:%lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu %lu
    >>
    >> This could be explained by a single-bit corruption of your kernel,
    >> namely if the place where printk tests a format character against '%'
    >> is broken. Maybe the '%' is bad, or maybe the comparison instruction.
    >
    >Agreed. /proc/{pid}/stat backs you up there too. %u is fine, only %lu is
    >mangled by something.
    >
    >It's certainly an amusing failure; I'm surprised by how well everything
    >runs with the system in this state; netstat and top fall over, uptime
    >calculations go wrong, and ps and inndwatch complain. Everything else is
    >happy as could be.
    >
    >
    >Whatever it is it probably isn't memory error; I do lots of gcc
    >compilations on this machine, and don't get nonrepeatable bootstrap
    >comparison failures...
    >
    >I'll try pulling out some of the patches and modules (lm-sensors can go
    >easily; reiserfs not so easily) and see what happens.

    Check back a few weeks in the archives - I think this has to do with some
    compiler issues where %lu isn't done because printk couldn't do the conversion.
    I seem to remember that a patch was provided too...
                                   

    -- 
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Jesse I Pollard, II
    Email: pollard@cats-chateau.net
    

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