Bizarre error message
John Chambers
jc at trillian.mit.edu
Tue Apr 10 09:47:27 EDT 2001
Here's a strange error message that I can't track down:
dl_boot: mmap of /dev/zero failed!
Where it appears is in a little wish tool that I wrote that just runs
"netstat -an" every N seconds, uses regexp to extract the tcp-related
lines, and displays them in a sindow. It usually works just fine,
giving me a running display of the tcp ports that are in use. But
occasionally it hangs, can't update its display for many seconds,
often with the machine bogging down so that mouse and keyboard input
lags by several minutes. When it wakes up, I find the above message
in the wish tools error widget, implying that netstat said this on
its stderr.
I haven't found any clues in any docs as to what this means or how to
fix whatever problem it implies. Why netstat (or maybe some library
routine it calls) would want to mmap /dev/zero isn't obvious, though
I suppose there's also no obvious reason to deny it.
The most obvious reason for mmap to fail would be a memory shortage,
but this happens when the machine is nowhere near saturated. In the
case a while ago, it happened when top in another window showed:
CPU states: 1.7% user, 1.7% system, 3.2% nice, 96.8% idle
Mem: 257472K av, 214000K used, 43472K free, 36808K shrd, 73980K buff
Swap: 136544K av, 47420K used, 89124K free 55836K cached
This is on a valinux/redhat system that calls itself 2.2.13-0.7.
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