[Dclug] Re: [Novalug] Hangs

[Przemek Klosowski]

   Yeah, like I said it's probably not a memory failure if you're not
   kernel panicking.  However, the addition of new RAM may have caused your

Well, the kernel is typically taking up few megabytes; if you have on
the order of a gigabyte of memory, it's very unlikely that an error
will affect the kernel directly (the chance is probably roughly
proportional to the size ratio, i.e. a fraction of a percent). Most
memory is used for application code/data and for disk cache---so the
symptom would probably be erratic operation of userland code.

There could still be a kernel failure induced by the malfunctioning
app passing crazy data to the kernel---there was a OS test about ten
years ago that consisted of essentially running completely random code
sequences, and passing random data in system calls. That test was
eye-opening, because it quickly brought down most commercial OSes;
I remember that Linux held out remarkably well against this attack
even then.