stability help needed

[Andy Green]

> The 'emerency terminal' is the term mode available from the standard
> graphical boot (described on screen as an emergency access tool). I have
> installed several times on this box for testing in different modes and with
> different variations of RH4 or Fedora. In each case the errors only show up
> when using X, but since that is what I want to do on this box that is a bit
> moot.

Hm you mean the "recovery" console you can get to by booting from the CD
again?  I don't recall seeing "emergency access".

> Since the error is only happening in a regular X session (terminal window or
> GUI wrapped yum), I have to assume it is likely a driver issue on the
> display adaptor.

There are plenty of other things that can be different, this is unlikely
to be the cause IMO.  If you really think this is the problem, change to
use the vesa driver:

edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

...
Section "Device"
...
        Driver      "xyz"  <---- change to "vesa" and restart X


> The error appears to be an actual segment fault thrown by yum as it runs - I
> will cut the message as soon as I can. The logs are not helpful (to me) at
> all in this case since they just show the end of the session, not a
> meaningful error. I am guessing this is one of those 'if I had not died I
> could have written the errror' situations.

What kind of exception is it?

 - usermode segfault just prints "Segmentation Fault" and the app is
killed.  In this case the app would be the python interpreter, not yum
which is written in python

 - python backtrace.  Multiple lines of text showing the stack of who
called who to get to the error line, usually with relatively informative
python library and yum function names.

 - kernel segfault.  Small or large dump of hex numbers showing the CPU
state at the time of the problem... not seen in X only on a VT AIUI so
this is probably not your problem

> Thanks for the pointers - I will gather some more error codes and see what I
> can find.

It can also often be helpful to run, eg

strace yum update

this will spew details of every system call, often looking at the last
few actions of the program before it dropped dead can give a clue as to
the cause.

-Andy
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