Re: server process (PID 27884) was terminated by signal 4 (SIGILL)

On Jan 4, 2008, at 12:44 AM, mljv@planwerk6.de wrote:

> Hi,
>
> i had a rather strange crash of my server (log file at the end of my  
> mailling)
> and i was googling for Signal 4 and read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGILL
>
> i am running on linux 2.6.18-5-686 and postgresql-8.1.9-0etch2.
>
> Most (all?) other processes on this machine got signal 4 at this  
> time also
> (postfix, munin), etc
>
> As i understood my reading about signal 4, there must be some kind  
> of hardware
> failure as the postgresql log says, too. I rebooted the server and  
> since then
> everything works fine. But i am going to drop this server and  
> replace it with
> a new one of course. I just want to ask if there is something else  
> besideds
> hardware failure which could force a signall 4 (ILL)?

Software bugs can on rare occasions (by overwriting return stack data
and heading off into the weeds, say), but there's no way they'd do  
that in
multiple processes simultaneously

It's conceivable it was just a transient problem ("a cosmic ray" -  
they really do
happen occasionally) but it's much more likely you have bad hardware.
Probably either RAM, disk or disk controller.

Cheers,
   Steve