The Deadly `ping -f'

Taneli Vahakangas (taneli@firmament.fi)
Sun, 18 Apr 1999 01:30:45 +0300 (EEST)


Hello, world!

There's a scary problem with the newer kernels (tried 2.2.3 and 2.2.6) and
flood ping. I was able to kill my computer with the following (as root):
# (ping -f somehost) & (ping -f otherhost) &
I would consider this as a serious bug.

The machine fell into the ever-interesting land of __delay, __udelay and
__global_cli (as witnessed with SysRq-P), and was not able to respond
outside pings. Unfortunately, SysRq-U (or -S) didn't work.

Nothing in the logs, either. A solitary `ping -f' seems to work okay (but
didn't under 2.2.3, IIRC), but I only tried for a minute or so.

This is on a 2xPII with 3c509 and IPv4. The 3c509 is compiled as a module,
and there were no other modules loaded. My .config is available upon
request. ping version is from Debian (potato) netbase 3.12-2. If I left
out something relevant please be so kind and tell me.

The machine (and network) in question are mine and I can try patches or
provide more info.

Taneli <taneli@firmament.fi>

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