Re: Bug#44654: dpkg: seg faults w/2.3.17; problem traced to sysinfo() call

Tigran Aivazian (tigran@sco.COM)
Thu, 9 Sep 1999 14:49:51 +0100 (BST)


Hi,

You said (in essence):
> something is wrong with sysinfo(2) system call which hasn't changed for
> a while.

It is true that sysinfo(2) hasn't changed for many years but it uses
si_meminfo() and si_swapinfo() which change rather rapidly.

As for the bug, I think it is because at the moment the sysinfo.bufferram
is declared as unsigned long but the value it reports is huge (4G on my
system). The x86 si_meminfo() does the right thing which is
atomic_read(&buffermem) but I think whatever shrinks the buffer cache
sometimes forgets to decrement buffermem. E.g. on my system I had 4G of
buffermem whilst I only only have 64M of RAM.

Sorry, no time to fix this at work but I will look at it at home tonight.

Regards,
------
Tigran A. Aivazian | http://www.sco.com
Escalations Research Group | tel: +44-(0)1923-813796
Santa Cruz Operation Ltd | http://www.ocston.org/~tigran

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