[ILUG] Bad EIP value

[Ronan Cunniffe]

On Mon, 23 Aug 2004, Brendan Halpin wrote:

> Back to my machine after a welcome break, to find that several
> commands (df and ls -l in particular, though not plain ls) provoke
> a segmentation fault and the following error:
>
> -8<-----------------------------------------------------------------
>  <1>Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address 08e8c358

Memory exhaustion?  Act of $deity?

I'm late to this thread, but I encountered something similar to this a
month or two back - every app segfaulted, and the only solution was to
reboot the box.

Things to note:
   1) No prior warning, no recurrence.
   2) 1 year old, Dell RH-ready hw, in air-conditioned, dust-free room.
   3) It's a shell-account box - usually 10+ people logged in, running
      everything from pine to mathematica.
   4) The box rarely bogs down due to CPU or disk, but there have been
      RAM crunches.

Then again, it could simply be that there's lots of points-of-failure in
the kernel that result in the same symptom.

Ronan