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Re[4]: general protection: 4f00



Shlomi Fish <shlomif@vipe.technion.ac.il> wrote:
>  On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, Evgeny Stambulchik wrote:
>  
>  > Shlomi Fish <shlomif@vipe.technion.ac.il> wrote:
>  > 
>  > >  On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, Constantin Eizner wrote:
>  > >  
>  > >  > >From time ti time I get the following message and computer stop
>  > >  > responding.
>  > >  
>  > >  This is one of two things:
>  > >  1. a buffer overflow or something like that in squid, that had a deadly
>  > >  effect.
>  > 
>  > Are we talking about Windows or a real OS?! How can a buggy program make a
>  > bug-free kernel (running on a stable hardware) crash?!
>  >
>  
>  If the program is ran as root it can crash the system in a thousand
>  different ways. (e.g: "rm -fr /"). 

Well, of course; there is no protection against a man with a hammer as well. But
you wrote "a buffer overflow or something like that in squid"; I don't think you
really believe that the binary of the squid was trojan in this case.

>  Besides, every OS can have fatal buffer
>  overflows, including Linux. At least on an i386.

Which should be treated as a bug in the OS.

>  Maybe VMS or MVS or other real-time or mainframe OSes do something to
>  ensure this thing cannot happen. I'm not sure that Pentium processors
>  offer enough functionality to prevent this, or that Linux is designed with
>  this in mind. 
>  
>  And then again: who said the Linux kernel (or the i386 hardware for that
>  matter) is bug-free.

Nobody did. Neither did I intend to state this. All what I wanted to say was: if
an application makes an OS crash, than there is a bug in the OS (which doesn't
mean the application is bug-free).

Regards,

Evgeny


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