FreeBSD child process die for root

[Roland Smith]

On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 08:23:52PM -0500, Sagara Wijetunga wrote:
> Roland Smith writes: 
> 
> > On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 02:04:09AM -0500, Sagara Wijetunga wrote:
> >> Hi  
> >> 
> >> I'm Sagara Wijetunga from Tomahawk Computers from Singapore, makers of the 
> >> Tomahawk Desktop, a FreeBSD based desktop operating system 
> >> (http://www.tomahawkcomputers.com/) which is free for personal use.  
> >> 
> >> Ever since we upgraded our Tomahawk Core OS to the FreeBSD 7.2 sources, we 
> >> experienced a strange issue as follows:  
> >> 
> >>    1. The root cannot login from the console, child process forked die with 
> >> “uid 0: exited on signal 11”.
> >>    2. Normal users can log in, no issue.
> >>    3. Normal users can type “su” and become root, but “su -l” 
> >> results child process forked die with “uid 0: exited on signal 11”.
> >>    4. The /var/log/messages shows “(cron), uid 0: exited on signal 11 
> >> (core dumped)” 
> > 
> > Based on your symptoms, it looks like something in the restart commands
> > file for root causes the shell to crash... 
> > 
> > What shell are you using for root? 
> > 
> 
> Hi Roland, thank you for the reply. 
> 
> I have tested with bash, sh and csh. It seems the child process forked 
> simply die irrespective of the shell. 

Ok, so it's probably not a shell problem
 
> There  is no change in the dot files for root:
> [root at tds sagara]# diff /root/.cshrc /usr/src/etc/root/dot.cshrc
> [root at tds sagara]# diff /root/.login /usr/src/etc/root/dot.login
> [root at tds sagara]# diff /root/.profile /usr/src/etc/root/dot.profile 

/root/.login executes the fortune program. Can you su to root and then
run '/usr/games/fortune -s'?

> Here is the log message for "su -l":
> Jul  2 12:38:17 tds kernel: pid 943 (su), uid 0: exited on signal 11 

It could be a hardware problem. Signal 11 can be a sign of bad memory.
Can you reproduce the problem on multiple machines?

> Btw, what is "restart commands file for root"? 

The "rc" in .shrc stands for restart commands.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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