Re: Upgrade process generates signal 11 during Finding Packages

[Bill Nottingham <notting arl wustl edu>]

Kenneth Earl Harker (kharker cs utexas edu) said: 
> Thus spoke Stephen P. Molnar:
> > 
> > Unfortunately while the installer is finding packages to upgrade a problem
> > obviously arises because I get the following:
> > 
> > 	install exited abnormally - received signal 11
> > 	sending termination signals ... done
> > 	sending kill signals ... done
> > 	unmounting file systems
> > 	/mnt/production
> > 	/mnt/rhimage
> > 	/mnt/proc
> > 	you may safely reboot your system
> 
>      I get the exact same thing, only on a never-before-used IDE hard disk
> while doing a new install.  I've had this problem for a couple of weeks and
> I've been unable to resolve it.  I'm afraid I have no idea what signal 11
> means...

Signal 11 means various things.

In the general sense, signal 11 is SIGSEGV, aka "Segmentation fault".
It generally means a program accessed memory that didn't belong to it, and
therefore implies that there's a bug in the program somewhere.

However, in some cases, it means something different.
For example, if when you compile large software (such as a kernel) you
get a message such as:

gcc: Internal compiler error: program cc1 got fatal signal 11

it could signify hardware problems, such as corrupted memory.
See http://www.bitwizard.nl/sig11/ for more details.

In a really specific case, if you get this error when compiling on
a RedHat 5.0 system and you have a Cyrix processor, it's because the
new version of gcc exposes some problems with the cache on the Cyrix.
People have reported a workaround for this by installing a version
of gcc located at:
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/GCC/gcc-2.7.2.3-glibc.bin.tar.gz

As to a signal 11 during the install, I'm not sure what the exact
problem could be - I've gotten the 5.0 installer to segfault,
but it was on a pretty specific case that wouldn't apply to
either of these two cases.

Bill