From: Mitchell Dorrell <mwd@psc.edu>
To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Cat a binary = system crash?
Date: Fri, 9 May 2025 00:44:17 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAHqckJ3bgFOKpbaPJQuiEuZhSR7kZxiKCfGfHXnsDX0AkJuTVw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <a56a9a76-d0b1-467f-bca1-2dfcfcdd2545@gentoo.org>
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On Thu, May 8, 2025, 22:23 Nate Eldredge <nate@thatsmathematics.com> wrote:
Unless you can reproduce it, I don't think we can reject the "null
hypothesis" that the crash was caused by something unrelated (e.g. hardware
problem) that just coincidentally happened to occur during this particular
task.
I fully agree. I haven't decided whether I'm hoping I can reproduce it, or
whether I'm hoping I can't.
On Thu, May 8, 2025, 22:59 Eli Schwartz <eschwartz@gentoo.org> wrote:
> I would say that this is an almost fallacious way to look at things,
> honestly. urxvt is a userspace application, so it "can't" crash the system,
> no matter what I do with it... right? Even if I run `sudo
> /usr/sbin/crashsystem`, it's running in a userspace application, what can
> it do really?
I disagree. With neither a setuid binary nor my password, it would be a
major problem if a userspace application is allowed to crash the system. If
a buggy application can do so accidentally, then a malicious application
can do so deliberately.
Userspace applications have to make use of kernel facilities for everything
> they do, such as displaying graphics on the screen. A not-entirely-uncommon
> cause of system crashes is bugs being triggered in a GPU driver.
Yes, I forgot to mention that. I specifically included the details about
the GPU driver and kernel modules because I'm guessing that urxvt (or maybe
Xorg) triggered a bug in the GPU driver. I suppose terminal beeps could
trigger a bug in an audio driver, but audio drivers always seemed more
stable to me.
-MD
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2025-05-09 4:45 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 5+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2025-05-09 2:12 [gentoo-user] Cat a binary = system crash? Mitchell Dorrell
2025-05-09 2:21 ` Nate Eldredge
2025-05-09 2:57 ` Eli Schwartz
2025-05-09 4:44 ` Mitchell Dorrell [this message]
2025-05-14 2:40 ` Mitchell Dorrell
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