Re: BUG at mm/memory.c:1501 in 2.6.0-test5

[Nick Piggin]

Richard B. Johnson wrote:

> On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Petr Vandrovec wrote:
>
>
> > On 18 Sep 03 at 13:43, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> >
> > > On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 10:27:58PM +0200, Petr Vandrovec wrote:
> > >
> > > > EIP:    0060:[<c015be10>]    Tainted: PF
> > >                snprintf(buf, sizeof(buf), "Tainted: %c%c%c",
> > >                        tainted & TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE ? 'P' : 'G',
> > >                        tainted & TAINT_FORCED_MODULE ? 'F' : ' ',
> > >                        tainted & TAINT_UNSAFE_SMP ? 'S' : ' ');
> > >
> > > This is probably the reason you're not getting much in the way of a
> > > response.
> > I explicitly stated that it happened shortly after I shut down VMware UI,
> > and that I spent whole day trying to find what's going on, finally
> > politely asking for help, hoping that someone could have a clue
> > what went wrong.
> >                                            Petr Vandrovec
>
> Okay. I'll be more specific. The "Tainted PF" shown above is
> because you have installed a module that is [P]roprietary and
> it was [F]orced to load.
>
> Any module running inside the kernel can destroy anything.
> There is no protection inside the kernel. A simple bug in any
> module can not only cause your machine to die, but it can, in
> principle, destroy everything on your hard disk as well as
> shutting down your LAN, causing millions of dollars of
> damages (seriously). It is possible.
>
> Therefore, If you report a bug, and your system is tainted
> with a proprietary module, nobody can help you because the

You should send your report to the vendor. They might not be supporting
2.6 yet though. Alternatively, try to reproduce the problem having never
loaded closed source modules since booting: it is now much less
frustrating for developers to track down and fix.



-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/