On Mon, 2012-10-08 at 19:16 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote: > On 10/08/2012 02:15 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote: > > On Mon, 2012-10-08 at 09:46 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote: > >> On 10/08/2012 04:38 AM, Temlakos wrote: > >>> Beginning about an hour ago, I've been hit with a ton of application > >>> terminations. All of them say the same thing: "Signal 11 (SIGSEGV). > >>> Which I believe translates as "Signal segmentation violation." > >> > >> In addition to what others already wrote, check if you aren't running > >> out of memory (run "df" and check its output). > > > > df tells you about free disk space. > Yes - My fault. I probably should have written "disk space" instead of > "memory". > > > It has nothing whatever to do with > > RAM, > It depends. C.f. tmpfs, RAM disks etc. > > > besides which a lack of disk space (even in swap) would cause a > > system error message, not a segfault. > When running out of memory, inside of a program a malloc may fail, which > may cause a pointer be set something invalid, which later may cause a > SEGFAULT when the pointer is dereferenced.
If malloc fails it will return an error rather than a pointer. Now of course a completely incompetent programmer might not bother checking the return value, hence causing a segfault when the invalid pointer is used, but the OP mentioned that several programs were getting segfaults in a short period of time. It's highly improbable that all of these (including widely used apps such as Thunderbird) are so badly programmed. poc -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
