[7.0] /bin/sh segfaulting during boot

[Oliver Fromme]

walt <w41ter at gmail.com> wrote:
 > Oliver Fromme wrote:
 > > walt<w41ter at gmail.com>  wrote:
 > > >  I'm now running RELENG_7 on three x86 machines, but (only) one of
 > > >  them is behaving badly during bootup.
 > > > 
 > > >  Once the rc.d scripts start to run, I see /bin/sh crashing dozens of
 > > >  times before I finally see the login prompt.  A few of the normal
 > > >  processes actually start okay, like ppp and named (this is my home
 > > >  firewall), but many normal daemons like syslogd and sendmail are
 > > >  not running.
 > > 
 > > Last time I had symptoms like that, it turned out to
 > > be bad RAM.
 > 
 > I suspected the same, so I ran memtest86 overnight with no errors.

That's not a guarantee for no RAM problems (though it's
a strong indication).

 > I compiled sh with debugging symbols -- and it won't crash so I
 > still can't get a backtrace.  Very frustrating.  But at least I
 > have a working sh :o)

Maybe a bit toggled on your disk inside the sh binary,
and the disk failed to detect and/or report the error.

GELI and ZFS are supposed to detect such silent disk
corruption, so maybe you might want to use one of them.

Best regards
   Oliver

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