"Gordon W. Ross" writes:
> I have a 3/60 which exhibits this bug where everything using some
> shared-library dumps core.  I've seen it on other machines, but so
> rarely that I could not "home in" on it.  I have greater hopes now!

I think I've seen this on my 3/50 too...
 
> Can anyone provide clues as to when this bug does or does not bite?

When I fired up 3 xterms the other day (as part of starting an X session)
all 3 indicated a "segmentation fault" when trying to determine my username. 
(I have a:   set prompt="`whoami`@`hostname`-\!> "
in my .cshrc, and the "whoami" was failing)

I then tried running "whoami" in one of the xterms, and it worked fine...
I tried "id", and it worked to....  I though it rather strange that "whoami" 
should have failed for the initial xterms, but didn't worry about it too 
much... 

A little later that evening I tried doing a "su", and it dumped core too....  
I tried it again, same thing.  Then I did an "ls" (which worked), and tried 
the "su" again.  This time the "su" worked...  go figure...  

sendmail, cron, atrun, and syslogd have all core-dumped on me as well.  This 
"core-dump" behavior has only started (for me) since I got the new/improved 
kernel with the DMA fixed (which is still working very well).  I don't recall 
seeing this problem before the new kernel.... 

Hope this helps....  (If you'd like me to provide you with some "kernel guts" 
if/when this problem occurs again, just let me know what you want and how to 
get them....)

Later...

Greg Oster

oster@cs.usask.ca
Department of Computer Science
University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, CANADA