Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!ames!lll-winken!carlson
From: carlson@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV (Joe Carlson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.xenix
Subject: 2.3.1 text corruption
Message-ID: <26353@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Date: 3 Jun 89 18:09:13 GMT
Organization: Lawrence Livermore Labs, NCD  Livermore, CA
Lines: 20


        I am experiencing a rather odd corruption problem under XENIX 386
2.3.1.  Basically it appears that the in-core version of certain heavily
used programs appears to get corrupted every once in a while. I believe that
I have eliminated hardware trouble as the cause of this.
        The steps I took to isolate this were: 
        1.) /bin/sh starts to core dump when run
        2.) mv /bin/sh to /bin/sh.old
        3.) cp /bin/sh.old to /bin/sh
	4.) /bin/sh now works correctly (/bin/sh.old still core dumps)
	5.) cmp -l /bin/sh /bin/sh.old shows no diffs

	It appears that there is a text cache kept in the kernel which
has corrupted it's entry for program in question.... rebooting the system
clears the trouble (or making another disk copy as I show above).  The problem
appears VERY sporadically and has hit a number of programs on the system
(/bin/sh and /etc/nntpd[one of my own]) that get run a lot.

Joe Carlson	carlson@lll-winken.llnl.gov	(415)-422-5584