I have a PowerBase 180 oldworld powerpc with Debian woody (2.2.19-pmac). I started having a crashing problem about 4 weeks ago, the easiest way to repeat it was to use nano (1.0.5/1.0.6) to edit a document, and select the Search function or the save-file function. In either case, the computer would freeze as it was attempting to update the help keys across the bottom of the screen. This never occurred in nano-tiny, which is a reduced-library version.
There is no kernel message with this crash, it simply freezes the machine. I tried strace, its log gets cut off shortly after the keystroke which causes the crash, so it's not much help. I traced the execution of the code from nano into the ncurses library, and determined that it was crashing right after a call to _nc_flush(). Here is an example backtrace just prior to a crash: in doupdate() at ../ncurses/tty/tty_update.c:787 _nc_flush(); called by wrefresh() at ../ncurses/base/lib-refresh.c:60 called by bottombars() at ../nano/winio.c:562 called by display_main_list() at ../nano/winio.c:1152 called by search_abort() at search.c:298 The maintainer says that _nc_flush() simply calls fflush. Of course, that function is called many times in this and other programs -- it is only these special circumstances in which it causes a crash. This problem doesn't occur on my newworld powerpc, but it is reliably repeatable on my oldworld. I also got serveral crashes in dselect which uses the same ncurses library. I verified that the same thing happens if I install on a different partition, even a different disk. It did *not* repeat on another oldworld computer (PowerCenter 150) with the same woody installation (it's on an external SCSI disk, I just moved the disk to the new machine) - so I concluded it was some conflict with my ATY Mach64 card (which according to lspci, is an ATI 3D Rage I/II 215GT [Mach64GT] (rev 41). I tried adding video=atyfb to the kernel arguments, that did not affect it. I constructed a patch which prevents the crash; not sure if it would be much help in determining the true cause though. The patch just uses wredrawln to claim that the 2 help lines are corrupt and asks for them to be completely redrawn rather than just refreshed. Another interesting point is that I can run all the ncurses test programs except worm, which crashes in a few seconds, but only when the console it's running on is actually visible. And, the blink and underline attributes don't seem to work on my system. Finally, I downloaded the kernel-image-2.4.12-powerpc package to see if changing the kernel would make a difference. It did, the nano crash disappeared. The worm crash is still present, though. I can continue trying to trace the problem in worm, if there's interest, since it's present in both kernels. Or if there's interest in the kernel 2.2.19 nano problem, whatever... I am interested in helping track down the problem because it's such a hard crash. My filesystem is of course damaged when I have to hard reboot. I signed up to the list. Let me know what I can try. And Happy Thanksgiving! -- *----------------------------------------------------------------* | .''`. | Debian GNU/Linux: <http://www.debian.org> | | : :' : | debian-imac: <http://debian-imac.sourceforge.net> | | `. `'` | Chris Tillman [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | `- | May the Source be with you | *----------------------------------------------------------------*
