Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU!keith
From: keith@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Keith Packard)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: xdm problem on Sun 4's -- unknown status 2817
Message-ID: <9002260343.AA06749@expo.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: 26 Feb 90 03:43:30 GMT
References: <11008@zodiac.ADS.COM>
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 28


> If I look at the debug output from xdm, things start acting strangely
> right after
>   ManageSession :0
> At this point in a successful run, resources are loaded and the login
> widget appears.  In the unsuccessful runs, xdm falls right into
>   Manager wait returns pid: 11535
>   Display exited with unknown status 2817
> The unknown status is always 2817.

When the child process exits because of a signal, xdm computes
the effective status as

	(256 * signal_number) + 1

This makes the error message meaningful, because 2817 is 0x0b01 or
11 * 256 + 1 -- your child process is receiving signal 11 (SIGSEGV).  This
means that it is dumping core somewhere and you should be able to get 
at least a stack trace from the wayward process which will narrow the search
for a cause quite a bit.  xdm doesn't chdir around, so you should find the
core file in the directory you started xdm from.

As usual, the debug information from xdm is opaque to almost everyone.
Someday I should spend several hours making sense of all of the various debug
statements and make them more understandable.

Keith Packard
MIT X Consortium