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From: earle@POSEUR.JPL.NASA.GOV (Greg Earle - Sun JPL on-site Software Support)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: xdm problem on Sun 4's -- unknown status 2817
Message-ID: <9002251130.AA01156@poseur.jpl.nasa.gov>
Date: 25 Feb 90 11:30:34 GMT
References: <11008@zodiac.ADS.COM>
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Reply-To: earle@poseur.jpl.nasa.gov
Organization: Sun Microsystems - JPL on-site Software Support
Lines: 38

In comp.windows.x article <11008@zodiac.ADS.COM> you write:
>Display exited with unknown status 2817
>
>The unknown status is always 2817.
>
>xinit works fine, as does starting the server by hand.  The problem
>does not appear on our Sun 3/60's.  Specifics below.
>
>Any ideas?

Look at /usr/include/sys/wait.h, and RTFM wait(2):

WAIT(2)                   SYSTEM CALLS                    WAIT(2)
...
          +  If the low-order 8 bits of w_status are non-zero and
             are  not equal to 0177, the child process terminated
             due to a signal; the low-order 7  bits  of  w_status
             contain the number of the signal that terminated the
             process.  In addition, if the low-order seventh  bit
             of  w_status  (that  is,  bit 0200) is set, a ``core
             image'' of the process was produced; see sigvec(2).

`2817' is hex 0xB01.  Translation: process died with signal 11 (SIGSEGV).  It
did not leave a core dump (unfortunately).

I suppose one could say that it is a `bug' in xdm that it doesn't try to
interpret the value returned by wait(2) a little better (like putting out the
lower 8 bits as the status value, and checking bit 8 to see if the process
stopped or terminated abnormally, and outputting the higher 8 bits as the
signal number if abnormal termination occurred.  RFE of xdm's debug mode, I
say ...

--
-- 
	Greg Earle
	Sun Microsystems, Inc. - JPL on-site Software Support
	earle@poseur.JPL.NASA.GOV	(direct)
	earle@Sun.COM			(indirect)