[CentOS] General protection error

Haakon Gjersvik Eriksen
Mon, 04 Jun 2007 06:37:13 -0000

G'morning, all

Over the last few months I've had a few instances of log lines of the
following type on a handful of servers:
nscd[9301] general protection rip:2a9578dea0 rsp:405f1368 error:0

As far as I've been able to figure out, this is the kernel warning me
that nscd has tried to write outside of its allocated memory. Since the
current nscd is started at the exact same time as the log message, I
suspect that the kernel killed the process and it was automatically
restarted by our automatic host management system.

This has happened to different processes than nscd, and the servers
where I've seen it run CentOS 4.4 or 4.1, with kernel versions
2.6.9-42.0.2.ELsmp, 2.6.9-42.0.10.ELsmp or 2.6.9-11.106.unsupportedsmp.

I've not been able to find much relevant regarding what can be done
about this, but I suspect that the general answer is "this is a bug in
the application". If someone knows of any condition where this is more
likely to appear than others, or any other debugging hints, I'd be happy
to know about it.

--
  Haakon Gjersvik Eriksen     --                  Basefarm AS