# what does "kernel: ... general protection"  means ?

## toralf

I'm wondering about teses message sin my syslog :

```
2010-09-29T10:55:24.805+02:00 n22 kernel: linux-v2.6.35[31299] general protection ip:b7648af5 sp:b05ad70 error:0 in libc-2.11.2.so[b761d000+140000]

2010-09-29T10:55:36.046+02:00 n22 kernel: linux-v2.6.35[31312] general protection ip:b7615af5 sp:a05ad70 error:0 in libc-2.11.2.so[b75ea000+140000]

```

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## aCOSwt

Hmmm... generally that some code in your libc tried to do something while not having the required priviledges to do so.

More often associated with memory accesses. (write in a read-only area, executing code not matching legal instructions...)

Edit : BTW do you get exotic CFLAGS / CXXFLAGS ?

Or some even more exotic compiler... something like a graphitized-gcc 4.5 I mean...   :Very Happy: Last edited by aCOSwt on Wed Sep 29, 2010 11:04 am; edited 1 time in total

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## toralf

 *aCOSwt wrote:*   

> BTW do you get exotic CFLAGS / CXXFLAGS ?

 Ofcourse - not.

I'm running a mostly stable Gentoo w/ vanilla kernel 2.6.35.6 compiled with gcc-4.4.3-r3 (-r3 was accidently marked stable for some hours and I decided to not go back to -r2) and 

```
CBUILD="i686-pc-linux-gnu"

CFLAGS="-O2 -march=native -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"

CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
```

UpdateFWIW 1/2 hour later this happened : http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/Update

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## aCOSwt

 *toralf wrote:*   

> I'm running a mostly stable Gentoo w/ vanilla kernel 2.6.35.6 compiled with gcc-4.4.3-r3 (-r3 was accidently marked stable for some hours

 

 :Shocked: 

What did you rebuilt since then ?

Warning : to my understanding, r3 did not only followed some innocent unstable->stable->unstable process... there seems to be also some somber issue with r3 patchset. Could be possible that the r3 you emerged is not correctly patched.

If your general protection faults appear only since your gcc update, I would stronly advise to re-emerge 4.4.3-r3 or come back to r2

(And of course what your rebuilded since then too)

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## krinn

Generally you'll get the program and pid that do the gpf.

If i trust your log it is kernel-2.6.35, the kernel itself. Having clean clfags for emerge won't affect how your kernel was build, the question is how you build that kernel? with bad processor set, strange cflags? Or some other weirdness, like downgrade glibc (yeah some people are just crazy)...

The question (as i imply the answer for the kernel build is: i didn't do ricing on my kernel !): what did you change to your toolchain or kernel?

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## toralf

 *krinn wrote:*   

> If i trust your log it is kernel-2.6.35, the kernel itself.

 

```
tfoerste@n22 ~/devel/linux-2.6 $ uname -a

Linux n22 2.6.35.6 #1 SMP Mon Sep 27 10:07:17 CEST 2010 i686 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8600 @ 2.40GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

```

 *krinn wrote:*   

> 
> 
> the question is how you build that kernel? with bad processor set, strange cflags? Or some other weirdness, like downgrade glibc (yeah some people are just crazy)
> 
> ...
> ...

 Well - really not at all - I'm too old to play w/ the basic platform I need for my work therefore I use a mostly stable Gentoo (except the compiler revision -r3).

But I'll take a look to my syslog to see whether this will happens again.

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