On Wed, 19 Dec 2007, UNIX admin wrote:
>> Hi,
>> Got an app that coredumps and the app developer is
>> blaming the O/S install as the problem. This is the
>> truss output (last part shown):
>>
>> Incurred fault #6, FLTBOUNDS %pc = 0x0001C88C
>> siginfo: SIGSEGV SEGV_MAPERR addr=0xFF2707B0
>> Received signal #11, SIGSEGV [default]
>> siginfo: SIGSEGV SEGV_MAPERR addr=0xFF2707B0
>> is is the pstack output:
>
> Look, right there your can see that the crash has been caused by a SEGV,
> which is a segmentation fault. As soon as you see that, it's game over: what
> it means is that a piece of code tried to access an address outside of his
> process space. This usually happens with pointers, often when a function
> accesses a struct which either contains a bogus value, or a NULL pointer.
>
> So either the developer of the app is not very savvy with programming on
> UNIX(R), or they're giving you a bunch of bulls**t to get rid of you in a
> convenient way.
That's a bit harsh. Maybe the developer simply has _learned_ to develop
and troubleshoot in this way:
- if it happens on platform X but not on platform Y,
what's the conclusion ?
"platform X has a problem"
Sounds strange to act like this ? Well - check, for example:
http://www.itsmsolutions.com/newsletters/DITYvol2iss24.htm
It's being taught that way. Particularly if people don't understand all of
the methodology, but focus on the 'single steps', i.e. rip the questions
out of context. Which, as the above shows, is all too common.
Why does that happen ?
Personality profiling often ends up categorizing people into "procedural"
and "optional" behaviour patterns wrt. to how they work.
The former will follow checklists, such as the example just shown, and are
very prone to strongly believe argumentation as just shown is actually
"technical".
The latter will be horrified by that and say "need more info / looking
into before asserting any blame".
Who makes a better programmer ? Good question. I know many "procedural"
people who churn out code at 20x as fast as I could...
>
> Vendors like finger pointing, but all that does is make them lose business...
Not necessarily. This sort of behaviour is normal. That's why I gave an
extensive answer. All shown so far points towards an application bug, but
then if more information surfaces that'd show Solaris did something wrong
which "surprised" the application - fine, I'll investigate then. Just so
far, no such information has been forthcoming. They might already have
found their bug :-)
FrankH.
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