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Silly Kernel Panic in Mac OS X 10.2.2

Posted by pudge on from the don't-try-this-at-home dept.

shibby tells us that it is easy to cause a kernel panic in Mac OS X 10.2.2, by attempting to move a directory into the same location as another one of the same name, using Terminal: mkdir ~/mydir; cd ~/mydir; mkdir mydir; mv mydir ... Kernel panic is instant. Save all your documents and quit your open apps if you feel the need to see it for yourself. Happy Thanksgiving!

9 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. IMPORTANT! by iMMersE · · Score: 5, Informative

    Be very careful with this - If you are testing, or accidentally gonna do this, you will lose both directories and all data in them.

    --
    codegolf.com - smaller *is* better.
  2. Re:Ooops by Gerry+Gleason · · Score: 4, Informative
    Except that string comparisons aren't particularly useful in deciding that two directory arguments are the same. You have to stat them and compare inodes and devs.

    Yes, I know this is trying to be funny, but on /. accuracy counts in humor as well.

  3. They know .... by Draoi · · Score: 5, Informative
    This was originally posted to the darwin-development mailing list, of which I'm a subscriber;

    Here's the message (login: archives, pass: archives)

    This list is teeming with Apple folks, so I'm sure someone's posted a RADAR bug already.

    This problem also came up on MacNN and is discussed in detail here

    Now here's the kicker - as the kernel is open-source (APSL - don't complain), someone's already traced the problem back to a recursive lock in the HFS+ subsystem (hfs_vnops.c). Kewl or wha'?

    --
    Alison

    "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein

    1. Re:They know .... by Space+Coyote · · Score: 4, Informative

      Apparently one of the reasons Apple has delayed the release of their XServe RAID product is so that they can completely re-write HFS to include journalling and other such niceties. I don't care just as long as they don't take away the stuff that we all love about Mac file systems.

      --
      ___
      Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
  4. Re:I hope you submited to Apple by Draoi · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yep! The guys on MacNN posted feedback to Apple last week. Expect a kernel Software Update sometime soon, I guess.

    --
    Alison

    "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein

  5. Re:Works just fine on my system.... (in Bash, thou by bdesham · · Score: 4, Informative
    Are you sure that
    1. You have the correct permissions to the folder, and
    2. You are running 10.2.2?
    Missing either of these might make the bug not work (oh no!).
    --
    Alcohol and Calculus don't mix. Don't drink and derive.
  6. ArsTechnica by Draoi · · Score: 5, Informative

    .. have a thread going on this, too. Link here

    --
    Alison

    "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein

  7. Re:Why? by stripes · · Score: 4, Informative
    Apple would have been better using someone else's kernel -- like the FreeBSD one -- verbatim instead of trying to hack up that Mach POS (which I've heard nothing but bad things about from OS people up at Carnegie Mellon, where Mach was developed).

    Well MACH isn't exactly an OS, it is more of an OS for running OSes, and one of the OSes it can run is the "BSD Single Server" which is a BSD4.3+/4.4ish derieved OS that isn't in my opnion as good as some of the other BSD4.4ish derived OSes (like FreeBSD).

    One of the other OSes that runs under MACH is a modifyed MacOS9. I havn't run OS9 (aka "Classic") on purpose for months, but other people find it rather indepsnsable, and wouldn't use OSX without it.

    As you say they could plop Carbon and Quartz ontop of FreeBSD just as easally as onto MACH's BSD Single Server. However getting OS9 to "run under" FreeBSD would have been a much larger pain.

    Of course, I certainly could be missing something -- could be that the FBSD kernel just didn't do something that Apple had to have it do, and that the FBSD people wouldn't have accepted. Could be SMP issues, I suppose...

    I doubt it is SMP issues. I'm not even sure the FreeBSD people would reject the stuff needed to get OS9-under-FreeBSD working, after all it might not be that different from what WINE needs from the kernel...but it would have taken a whole lot more time then getting OS9 running under MACH more or less along side the BSD Single Server (kind of under it and off to one side I susspect...)

    the device driver model is also different, and in a lot of ways better (and unfortunitly in a lot of ways worse) then FreeBSD.

  8. What's wrong with HFS+? by 2nd+Post! · · Score: 5, Informative

    What's missing that you want HFS+ to go away or something?

    It's got metadata, which Microsoft only *added* with NTFS
    It finally got journaling with 10.2.2
    It spans, quite comfortably, 180GB hard drives
    File sizes can be larger than 2gb, and I believe up to 2TB (2^63 bytes per file)

    Is there something missing? Perhaps encryption? Apple already has support for encrypted volumes...

    --

    GPL Deconstructed