[plug] crashing server

[James Devenish]

Hi,

In message <16710.53470.327990.81688 at pride.nsw.cmis.CSIRO.AU>
on Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 09:07:10PM +1000, Rob Dunne wrote:
>           I have a problem with a crashing server.

Do you mean that the machine's kernel panics and has to be rebooted,
or do you mean that a single programme aborts?

> The problem may lie with mutex variables  in a threads program,
> althought the crash appears to be in a line that says
> free((void *)b);

This typically results from either a double-free bug or an uninitialised
variable bug, both of which are coding errors. How do you know it is
crashing at this location? Have you already analysed it with GDB? Is it
a custom programme that you compile yourself or is it a FOSS product
that is part of your Linux distribution? If you have access to the
source code (which you do, if your quotation is literal), then you can
just tell the programmer: version of programme, source code filename,
line number, text of the line, and a symbolised GDB backtrace if
possible.

> 3) isnt there a version of gdb for kernel debugging -- is that what 
> I should be using?

Hard to tell without further information from you.