Subject: Subtle 'fsck' problem..
To: None <port-vax@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Arno Griffioen <arno@usn.nl>
List: port-vax
Date: 06/11/1998 09:48:00
While doing some stuff I ran into an 'fsck' problem which seems to be
very old. I don't know if it's VAX-specific or not..

I was trying out 1.3F with UVM on my 3600 (KA650) and it died booting with a
malloc failure and dumped me in the debugger. 

I then rebooted using 1.3E and it started checking my root FS.

All went well until it came to the 'fix bitmap' stage. Then fsck 
got a segmentation-fault and dumped core. :-(

Oh dear.. Now what?

I suspected the 'fsck' binary I compiled myself, so I grabbed a
binary from a 1.2 tarball I have and ran that.

To my surprise it died at the same spot!!

I even went back as far as 1.1A and it did the same...

I finally got the disk cleaned by running fsck and then _only_ answering
'yes' to the first question. After 5 or so fsck's the partition 
was clean once more.

So it seems that one of the earlier stages (blocks/pathnames) in fsck
causes some buffer overruns/stack corruption which in turn causes stuff in 
stages 5 and higher to segfault.

Anyone seen this before?

							Bye Arno.

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