[coLinux-devel] memory bug on reading /dev/mem

[Henry N. <Henry.Ne@Arcor.de>]

Hello!

Since new memory concept is implement, I had troubble with dual boot of
SuSE 9.0 on a partion. Today I found the leak:

A simple read 100h bytes from offset 400h of device /dev/ram always
crash the host system (WinXP 256MB RAM, coLinux 32,64 or 128MB RAM)

!!! Save all data and "sync", before try this !!!
This is the simple simulation of killing:
$ dd if=/dev/mem of=/dev/null bs=256 count=1 skip=4


More details:
Crash with blue screen KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR,
kernel panic, screen and system frozen, or simply reboot (mostly).

Problem was function "/usr/sbin/hwinfo --bios", called from 
/etc/init.d/kbd in startup scripts of SuSE 9.0 to detect state of 
numlock. Function memory_read failed, see in atachment.

User can simply set KBD_NUMLOCK=no in /etc/sysinfo/keyboard to disable 
use of hwinfo. But we should not crash with such a simple memory read!

Last runable (non crashing) was version 0.6.2-pre6.
This was before new memory concept was implement.
Version: 1be937cc8784776ae37ef4f32c74755ba0de7a0f
Date: 2004-10-24T19:46:37


-- 
Henry Nestler