Slashdot Mirror
Silly Kernel Panic in Mac OS X 10.2.2
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!
Please tell me that shibbey or pudge...or someone... actually submitted this bug to Apple before posting it here.
It'll be interesting, though, to see how long we wait for a fix. If this is a legit thing. I haven't tested it and don't plan to.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
This is as dumb as the windows file/run/file://C|/CON/CON doohickey.
Can this be exploited by a rouge shell script? "Funny_Picture.png.sh" wouldnt be fun, given the average mac user is
1) As guilable as windows users
2) Not as savvy to the ways of trick emails as windows users.
At least it wouldnt propergate - I assume theres a undered different mail clients on OSX. (I'm not a millionaire and cant afford my own mac you insensitive clod!)
Try explaining to mom why she can't have two directories named letters without crashing the machine
The GUI (gracefully) prevents you from doing this, so if Mom can understand the sequence of terminal commands that triggers the panic, she'll have no trouble understanding why...
Funny you mention video editing. Even on the low end, your $1,200 PC is never going to run iMovie.
t icle2.h tml
;)
On the high end, your cost comparison is a joke, because the cost of the computer is the least of your expenses. A high end PC based (with Avid or the like) system is going to set you back $100,000 or more.
The cost for a similarly featured Apple video editing system with Final Cut Pro? Less than $10,000.
Read it and weep:
http://www.filmandvideo.com/New%20Pages/ar
Worried about this kernel panic ruining your video editing? Don't. You are not likely to be in your Terminal making two directories of the same name and moving them about in the course of your video editing. Even if you were, this is happening in the Unix part of OS X, which is open source, and it is being announced on Slashdot. Someone will probably fix it for fun over the weekend and email Apple a patch by Monday. We'll probably see an official, tested, security update from Apple next week. That is the beauty of open source.
If this were Microsoft and a "blue screen of death", well, don't hold your breath. Their response would be the same as seven years ago: "There are no significant bugs in Windows XP. Trust us.". Yeah, right! That's what PC Magazine said about Windows 95, when I spent 11 months trying to get a stable install of the original version.
Windows: "Go talk to my friend, an 800 pound monopoly-abusing gorilla!"
Mac: "And here's my good buddy, the 66,000 ton Godzilla!"
Godzilla: Stomp!
krel wrote:
;)
> os9 would never, despite its shabby memory
> protection, and pathetic preemptive multitasking,
> do that.
Nope, because OS 9 wasn't Unix, and so didn't use Unix terminology for operating system failures. OS 9 bombed, OS X panics (very rarely). BTW, any kernel hacker can, if they choose, get the source code and fix this bug. OS 9 couldn't do that either.
I'm glad, though, that I switched early enought that I got a chance to know OS 9. It really was amazing, despite it being basically a microcomputer OS, all the things Apple got it to do.
OS 9 is the blue-eyed caterpillar, small and awkward, but courageous and friendly.
OS X is the blue-eyed adult Moth, awesomely beautiful, supremely powerful. She soars above all, the peerless Queen of Monsters.
And Apple is, as always, Mothra Leo's Forever Friend.
Sure enough using /bin/mv it crashed as advertised.
/sw/bin/mv, which is the GNU version of mv from the fileutils package, just gives a "cannot overwrite directory" error.
But
This is (one of the many reasons) why the GNU versions of everything should be standard on all systems in the universe. So go fetch and install a copy of fink and (optionally) FinkCommander.
Also, "alias mv mv -i" is a Very Good Idea(tm).
"The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance." -Thomas Jefferson
Kind of OT, but what the hell.
When is Apple finally going to overhaul HFS+? It's a decent filesystem, but it has quite a few drawbacks and limitations, including this "issue", if what you say is true.
Microsoft finally did right and made NTFS the standard. BeOS has BFS, and Linux... well, there's about 10 good filesystems for Linux.
HFS+ has been around since the early days of multigigabyte hard disks. In computer time, that's an eturnity. Come on Apple, the time has come for HFS++.
I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it!
POSIX compliance would be nice. I know it's not going to happen, but it would be nice - for a Unix to not be POSIX-compliant is really quite a black eye for IT departments. This is one of the few areas where Apple failed to successfully blend the needs of Unix users with the needs of desktop consumer users.
Yes, you can use UFS filesystems under Mac OS X, but many Carbon apps, not to mention Classic, will fail to run - and the argument for using a Mac is substantially weakened if you're not going to be able to take advantage of the commercial software out there for it.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
It would be smart to enable journalling before doing this: /
sudo diskutil enablejournal
It's found. If it's not fixed, it soon will be. And since Apple is very good about patch releases through Software Update, the fix will soon be easily available to every OS X user.
This kind of partnership between OSS and a major commercial vendor is unprecedented, AFAIK. (No flames, please; if I'm wrong, just tell me so, and who did it first.) It's produced some great things so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
POSIX isn't inherently good. Actually, I hate apps which use POSIX file paths as file primitives. If you change the path the application loses track of the file. How retarded is that?
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
The poor performance of UFS isn't Apple's fault.
Why would anybody use UFS anyway?
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life