Re: du CRASHES Solaris 8

[Jim Meyering]

Chris Niggeler <address@hidden> wrote:
> I built coreutils 6.9 on my Solaris 8 box, particularly because I like
> gnu du's -S (exclude size of subdirs) capability.
>
> When logged in as root, if I enter:
> du -Sk /
> I get a system panic and a crash!  Something about a null pointer; it
> scrolls by very fast, then the system restarts, and I end up with
> unix.# and vmcore.# in /var/crash/sol8.

Thanks for the report.
Anything that makes your system crash like that is almost always a bug
in the kernel.  Make sure you have applied all available Solaris 8 patches.
If so, see if you can still crash it while running du via truss.  i.e.,

  truss -o /var/tmp/du-truss-log du -Sk /

The log file that creates might be useful information if/when you
report it to Sun.

I have a strong suspicion that it is a known bug in Solaris' openat
function, since I too caused a few Solaris 10 crashes back when making
the GNU tools use openat.  Sun fixed it pretty quickly.

You might want to see if the latest version of coreutils causes
the same problem:

    ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-6.12.tar.lzma