Gentoo Archives: gentoo-hardened

From: "Anthony G. Basile" <basile@××××××××××××××.edu>
To: gentoo-hardened@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-hardened] Weird coincidental PAX crashes
Date: Thu, 15 May 2014 13:09:49
Message-Id: 5374BD09.1030507@opensource.dyc.edu
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-hardened] Weird coincidental PAX crashes by Joshua Kinard
1 On 05/13/14 15:39, Joshua Kinard wrote:
2 > On 05/10/2014 09:43, Anthony G. Basile wrote:
3 >> On 05/10/14 07:39, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
4 >>> On 05/10/2014 07:14 AM, Joshua Kinard wrote:
5 >>>>
6 >>>> I think I ran into this, too, in 3.11. It takes a few days of uptime before
7 >>>> it happens. Running 3.13.x now on my x64 machine and haven't ran into it
8 >>>> again. So I second the suggestion to upgrade your kernel.
9 >>>>
10 >>>
11 >>> I couldn't come up with a better idea, so last night I upgraded
12 >>> everything to hardened-sources-3.13.6-r3.
13 >>>
14 >>
15 >> Unfortunately I don't know what the "this" is because that trace stripped
16 >> all symbols --- at least in kernel land. In useland its pretty obvious:
17 >> refcount overflow detected in: syslog-ng. So some syscall initiated by
18 >> syslog-ng is hitting up against the overflow. An strace might tell us what
19 >> syscall, but it might be hard to go from there to where in the kernel the
20 >> overflow happens.
21 >>
22 >> Not to sound like a snotty dev, but please open bugs with these oopses so we
23 >> have a record in bugzilla. Email just buries this info.
24 >
25 > For me, I never had an actual oops. Just a note in dmesg that pax was
26 > killing command-line processes at random. Running services didn't seem to
27 > be affected, but I could go run grep or something and it'd just abruptly
28 > terminate.
29 >
30 > Kinda hard to file a bug on that and not have it closed as WONTFIX :)
31 >
32
33 That's not true. I take many approaches here and often don't find the
34 underlying problem. At the very least, I have a window of "bad
35 versions" even if I don't trace down why they are bad so I know what to
36 safely stabilize.
37
38 --
39 Anthony G. Basile, Ph. D.
40 Chair of Information Technology
41 D'Youville College
42 Buffalo, NY 14201
43 (716) 829-8197