Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!ukc!mucs!s2!dente
From: dente@s2.uucp (Colin Dente)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: Mystery Error
Message-ID: <5881@ux.cs.man.ac.uk>
Date: 21 Apr 89 18:41:02 GMT
References: <15461@elroy.Jpl.Nasa.Gov>
Sender: news@ux.cs.man.ac.uk
Reply-To: dente%s2%man.cs.ux@ukacrl.BITNET (Colin Dente)
Organization: University of Manchester, UK
Lines: 44

In article <15461@elroy.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> dave%jplopto@jpl-mil.jpl.nasa.gov writes:
>I get this sporadically unrepeatable message from various programs I run 
>under the AEGIS 9.7 shell. Specifically:
>
>- unable to unwind stack bacause of invalid stack frame
>
>This occurs rarely, and is not a majro problem, but it IS an annoyance. Any 
>of you folks have any idea what this really means? 

Well - to put in my 2p's worth (this is England, after all...)

I usually get this error running DPCE (the IBM PC emulator) on a node without
much disk space - and I usually stop getting it if I either move to a node with
more free space, or clear out some junk on the node I got problems on.  For 
this reason I've always assumed that it means you've run out of virtual memory
(i.e. no more room in /sys/node_data/proc_dir (or whatever)) - and this seems
to be consistent with what the error says it is - i.e. stack gets garbaged 'cos
there ain't no room for it - though, having said that - something like:

_Stuff this - I'm off - I can't allocate any more stack space_

might seem more appropriate.

The important thing is that this will be intermittent if you've got a 
reasonable amount of free space on the disk - as it'll only occur if you've
got a lot of processes gobbling up swap space.

Anyone who knows what they're talking about (as opposed to me who just babbles
incoherently) care to comment?

>      "Self justification is worse than the original transgression."
How true!

Colin


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