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!

Comments

Wow

[darkov]

Apple has a bug. This is amazing news. FP

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it called a 'worm' there?

I hope you submited to Apple

[feldsteins]

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.

Re:I hope you submited to Apple

[iMMersE]

In the spirit of scientific testing, I have just subjected my iBook to this - And sure enough, you get an instant kernel panic.

Re:I hope you submited to Apple

[Draoi]

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

Re:I hope you submited to Apple

[nuckin futs]

fixed in 10.2.3

Re:I hope you submited to Apple

[bsharitt]

I tried it too, but I didn't get a kernel panic, it just moved the directory.

Re: I hope you submited to Apple

[capmilk]

This bug has been announced in Usenet about two weeks ago, so I guess Apple probably has several hundred reports on the issue.

Send more, maybe that speeds up the repair process. >;->

Re:I hope you submited to Apple

[JMZorko]

Awhile ago, before Jaguar, I (inadvertently) found a way to make Mac OS X 10.1.something kernel panic, by writing some absolutely horrid BSD sockets code (the kind you write when you're trying to help a fellow developer but you've not slept in far too long). I submitted it to Apple via the darwin-dev list, and they were very hip on fixing it. A software update including the fix was available I think two weeks later.

Now, i'm sure they had other things in that update, and it wasn't just on my account, but they thought it important enough to roll it in anyway. I thought that was the coolest thing :-)

Regards,

John

Falling You - exploring the beauty of voice and sound http://www.mp3.com/fallingyou

Re:I hope you submited to Apple

[neuroticia]

And what version of the OS are you running? ;)

Re:I hope you submited to Apple

[AyeRoxor!]

I tried it too, but I didn't get a kernel panic, it just moved the directory.

So it moved a directory huh? It moved a folder over another folder of the same name? Did it copy the contents of the source folder into the destination folder? Did it delete the destination folder? What happened?

C|/CON/CON

[isorox]

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!)

Re:C|/CON/CON

[sweet reason]

Can this be exploited by a rouge shell script?

i don't think so, but a big blue one could do the job.

Re:C|/CON/CON

[TwP]

He He He He

The color of the shell script depends on your terminal settings or your syntax highlighting editor. Big blue shell script would imply VIM with the blue color theme. I prefer my shell scripts to be black and white . . . funny results come from all the grey areas.

Re:C|/CON/CON

[jericho4.0]

OS X comes with iMail, a very capable and slick mailer that I'm sure 90% of Mac buyers use. We might see a sploit for it, but the Unix permisions will keep it from being too bad (i hope).

This is definiatly an exploitable bug, but it's not root access, and any code useing it would be easy to fix.

Re:C|/CON/CON

[banal avenger]

It would have to include the instructions: "To view picture, save it to a location on your hard drive. Open up Terminal in /Applications/Utilites, then type 'cd /path/to/Funny_Picture.png.sh", and then type 'sh ./Funny_picture.png.sh'. After that, the user would have to *gasp* restart the computer. It's not even worth the time it would take to write the script.

Re:C|/CON/CON

[derch]

Don't know about the other two major mail clients (Eudora and Entourage), but Mail wouldn't trick users into double clicking a hypothetical "Funny_Picture.png.sh."

Shell scripts by default are associated with TextEdit. Double clicking on an attached shell script would open it in the editor. No execution. No harm.

As long as the other two mail apps follow the system's file association, all's well.

Its not a bug

[WesG]

Not only does it cause a kernal panic, but it slaps the user on the head and asks them, "Why the heck did you create a directory with the same name as the current directory????"

Those crazy kernal programmers :-)

Re:Its not a bug

[Gerry Gleason]

It could be several bugs, but it isn't clear. Does the same thing happen if you aren't moving the directory to itself as in the example? mkdir x y mv x y

Should leave you with subdir y containing subdir x, but 'mv x x' is an error. If the code for mv actually tries to treat 'mv x x' like 'mv x y' (x and y are directories), then it will be badly breaking the rules for using link(2) and unlink(2).

Although it isn't a particularly deep bug, the fact that it panics makes it pretty nasty. What I would be curious about it how/where it was introduced. None of the code involved should be special to Apple in any way, so what happens on BSD (probably gives you an error, right?). Linux gives: "mv: cannot move `x' to a subdirectory of itself, `x/x'", and I'd be very surprised that BSD doesn't do the same, so how did it get broken.

Re:Its not a bug

[notfancy]

FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE (GENERIC) #0: Tue Jun 11 06:14:12 GMT 2002
Welcome to FreeBSD!
[Z:~] I% mkdir x
[Z:~] I% cd x
[Z:~/x] I% mkdir x
[Z:~/x] I% mv x ..
mv: rename x to ../x: Directory not empty
[Z:~/x] I% cd ..
[Z:~] I% mv x/x .
mv: rename x/x to ./x: Directory not empty

Names changed to let the guilty run away scot-free...

Re:Its not a bug

[stripes]

None of the code involved should be special to Apple in any way

Mac OSX by default uses HFS+ rather then FFS, so there is a lot of Apple-specific code getting executed in there. Maybe they don't do namei cache invalidation correctly in their HFS+ file system code (for example).

Not a huge unforgivable bug to have, but one hopes they will try to fix it quickly. It would definitly re-enforces my opnion of OSX as very stable for a desktop OS, but not very stable as a server OS. Which is why I own an Apple laptop, but not an Apple rackmount computer ;-)

However if they don't fix this kind of bug fast they are less likely to sell Xserve systems...

...not that Sun didn't have a bug where if you ftruncate'd /dev/audio you got a panic for something like five years! Sure that is a little less serious because you could deny users access to /dev/audio on a share machine and not suffer, but still... and I think it worked on any streams object that lived int he file system, so....

...but it would be nice if Apple proved themselves to be better then that.

Ooops

[iMMersE]

Found the offending piece of code in Darwin ...

BOOL HFSPLUS_Directory_Move( const char *src, const char *dest ) {
if ( !strcmp( src, dest ) ) {
__kernelPanic( KP_IMMEDIATE );
} ...
}

Re:Ooops

[Gerry Gleason]

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.

Re:Ooops

[iMMersE]

I think you'll find checking string arguments would be a hell of a lot more useful than checking inodes in this case.

mkdir ~/mydir; cd ~/mydir; mkdir mydir; mv mydir ..

You are moving a directory in your pwd to it's parent. If the directory you are moving has the same name as the directory you are in, you get a kernel panic.

You're right, accuracy counts :)

Re:Ooops

[Gerry Gleason]

I'll admit to a little initial confusion about the example case, but still, string compare of the args doesn't get you anything. For 'mv' the usage case is moving a directory to an existing directory, which is a reduced case of 'mv [...] ' (moving a list of files and/or dirs to a dir). If the source is a file, you replace a file of the same name, but if there is a directory in the target dir matching the source name (just the basename part), then it should be an error whether the source is a file or directory.

Now, the issue WRT this now too long thread about a bad joke, is that the test is for existence of a dir in the target dir, not string comparison, or inodes (that's another case that may or may not work correctly).

Colonel Panic and General Controls...

[Ocelot Wreak]

First there was General Controls, who was sometimes drunk and forgot all my preferences.
Then there was Colonel Panic, who wouldn't work if you added two folders with the same name to the same in box on his desk.
What's next? Private Keychain will forget where he stored my passwords and x.509 certificates?
Oh wait... you were talking about kernels...
Sorry!
-wjc.

Re:Colonel Panic and General Controls...

[Rouxfus]

I dunno, but you deserve Corporal Punishment for that one.

Re:Colonel Panic and General Controls...

[bsartist]

Knock it off - you guys are both being a Major Pain.

Re:Colonel Panic and General Controls...

[adb]

Couldn't you have kept this thread private?

Re:Colonel Panic and General Controls...

[l0wland]

I know that BDSM-people like the military a lot. Now wait... BDSM.. BSD... ah !

Re:Colonel Panic and General Controls...

[l0wland]

Just kick private Parts. That will hurt him as well.

Re:Colonel Panic and General Controls...

[atomm1024]

Be glad you're not on Windows- They have General Protectionfault.

IMPORTANT!

[iMMersE]

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

Works just fine on my system.... (in Bash, though)

[ewwhite]

I was able to create a directory and move a directory of the same name into it. Bash is my default shell. Try the same thing in Bash. exx@eddy:~/mydir/mydir$

Re:Sure

[qengho]

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...

Re:Works just fine on my system.... (in Bash, thou

[ewwhite]

My bad. Misread the bug commands. It still doesn't crash under Bash.

/sw/bin/mv: cannot overwrite directory `../mydir'

I misunderstood the trigger

[Gerry Gleason]

Still, in Linux it just gives you an error message, or does what you would expect. I'm still curious about the origins of this bug, and where it is. I would look at the 'mv' command code first.

Re:I misunderstood the trigger

[Gerry Gleason]

I would be very concerned if a bug in mv caused a kernel panic. Probably its something in the filesystem code.

The raw system calls for thinks like link, unlink, and mknod expect the utilities that use them to maintain certain invariants (e.g. directories must be singly linked except for . and .. which must also be correct). Bad arguments to system calls can sometimes cause a panic, and it would probably be just inefficient to always check everything.

In some sense you are correct, it is in the filesystem, but the standard filesystem semantics expect user programs to follow the basic rules.

Re:I misunderstood the trigger

[pediddle]

No no no! No user-space program should ever be allowed to cause a panic. If the kernel has to check that those invariants are met, then that is the cost of stability (and, even more importantly, security).


From: 023jsdf@spam.com
Subject: I love you!

Hello, please open this program on your Mac for good times!

Attachment: dir-move-bug.app

They know ....

[Draoi]

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'?

Re:They know ....

[longbottle]

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++.

Re:They know ....

[slughead]

you can use UFS for OS X.. about a quarter of all programs (and all MS programs) can't take that whole "case sensitivity" thing.. and neither can I

Re:They know ....

[Space Coyote]

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.

Re:They know ....

[Anonymous Coward]

HFS+ has been around since about '98 with the releas of Mac OS 8.1 which is a long time, but not that long... I am not sure which drawbacks you are thinking of, really. This bug is just that, a bug, not an aspect of the filesystem. Case insensitivity is az feature, and will never be dropped. If the filesystem became case sensitive that would be viewed as a bug.

It is pretty clear that Apple is working on the filesystem. They hired some Be people who worked on BFS, and just released Jornaling with 10.2.2.

Re:They know ....

[merdark]

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'?

And here's reality. At least 90% (maybe more) of regular users (not tech gurus) don't care what the problem is, they want it fixed. Of the tech savvy 10%, I bet 90% of those just snort and go, "ok, where's the official fix, I'm not gonna recompile my bloody kernel".

So that means that this whole open-source => can find bugs faster really doesn't effect the majority of the population, and is only *really* important to very small number of people. The most vocal people just like use this as an excuse to scream and yell at how open-source is just *soooo* much better than anything else.

Not much of a kicker to me.

Re:They know ....

[Lars T.]

Well, most regular (Mac-) users dont't attempt "to move a directory into the same location as another one of the same name, using Terminal".

Re:They know ....

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.

Re:They know ....

[68kmac]

Don't really want to brag about it, but I guess I found this one originally - and by sheer accident. At least my post to a German Mac newsgroup predates that mailing list post by a couple of hours ...

Of course, I also reported it on Apple's MacOS X Feedback form. Use that one, they really do seem to read it.

bye, Dirk

Re:They know ....

[valmont]

you are missing the point here. It works this way:

1. user accidentally finds bug in OS
2. user talks about it on open-source forums and other places on the internet
3. Apple gets notified as well as open-source community at large
4. within minutes of its discovery, some geeks manage to find the root of the problem
5. apple developers are notified of geeks' findings, confirm, fix, and thoroughly test the fix.
6. within days apple users get a software update notification if bug is important, or fix is rolled into the next major sub-dot release if fairly inconsequential for the broader user base, as it might be the case for this one

You see, apple users don't need to do shit. All i know is that some bug that is fairly inconsequential to me was found, and that it's guna get fixed, fast, and my next OS X release will be all the stronger, and all i'll have to do is click the "install" button when prompted, and i will feel warm and fuzzy all over. I don't even need to what a fucking kernel is.

now that's just me. Yes, many geeks out there will gladly hunt-down the bug in the source code and recompile their kernel.

The point is, you know problems are addressed in an appropriate matter.

So yes, open-source, is, indeed, so much better than anything else, especially if you're dealing with what i consider in my little world, the mission-critical piece of software that is my tibook's operating system.

Such process shows me that a product that relies heavily on mature open-source components is less likely to cause productivity-killing crashes and loss of data such as the ones i've experienced with my previous dell laptop running win2k, as described in one of my journal entries.

And if was to direct an IT department, gee, i just may consider putting a flat-panel iMac on every employee's desktop. Shit i could mount user directories from a central location, enabling employees to switch work stations, i would uniformely configure all machines, prevent users from writing files or installing applications outside of their home directories, i could ssh in each box for sporadic debug work, i could create automated processes to create development environments based on users' needs, wether they're graphic artists or J2EE application developers.

OS X owns you.

this is it people. we are well on our way to reach the nirvana of computing, with symbiotic collaboration between a major hardware and software vendor and the open source community at large, market share gains in each camp benefits the other.

Re:They know ....

[valmont]

heh. smartass. ;]

Re:They know ....

[valmont]

damnit english is such a confusing language. arrRRH. i stand corrected btw :)

Wether

Weather

thanks.

Re:Works just fine on my system.... (in Bash, thou

[bdesham]

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!).

ArsTechnica

[Draoi]

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

Video editing was Re:mail info

[Melantha_Bacchae]

Funny you mention video editing. Even on the low end, your $1,200 PC is never going to run iMovie.

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/art icle2.h tml

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! ;)

Re:Video editing was Re:mail info

[isorox]

Indeed, altough blind windows users insist that XP and 2k dont crash, they do.

However my $1,200 computer runs premiere pretty well - simple disolves run at about 12fps, more fancier transitions drop as low as 0.5-1fps. Most of the time its fine though. I can overlay text at about 5fps easilly too, and then send it back out to the DV-Ananlog converter.

(Premiere wasnt in the $1,200 cost, but then its not in the cost for the Mac either. I have got some crap free programs bundled with some of the cards. Windows wasnt in the cost either - but the uni has some dumb site license thing or something)

Re:Video editing was Re:mail info

[eht]

sure, but the upgrade to osx 10.2 will cost you 129$

Re:os9 never did that

[GigsVT]

pathetic preemptive multitasking

More like non-existant. The way I understand it, the low level code was non-reentrant, so it was inherently impossible without a total rewrite.

Why does that make this story a troll though? Is it so amazing that a relatively new OS has a bug, whereas an older and heavily tested one would not?

Re:os9 never did that

[Melantha_Bacchae]

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. ;)

Could it be a copyright problem ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't "mydir" a Microsoft innovation? Could explain why it crashes ;p

MacOS and preemptive threading.

[0x0d0a]

More like non-existant

I believe that classic MacOS could do preemptive threading of some sort, but only with 680x0 code, not PPC.

I got interested in writing threaded stuff under the MacOS at one point, so this is out of hazy memory here.

Re:MacOS and preemptive threading.

[Textbook Error]

Pre-emptive threading has been available on Classic Mac OS for some time - either through the Thread Manager (first thread API, dates to 68K Macs) or MP Tasks (second thread API, developed in conjunction with Daystar for their PowerPC clones and still available in Carbon on 9 or X).

Of course up until Mac OS 9 threads suffered from not being able to call much in the way of system APIs, so threaded apps were not as common as they are on Windows (but were still used for cases where it was worth doing: Photoshop, renderers, etc).

Why?

[0x0d0a]

Apple has a bug. This is amazing news.

I'd say it's pretty notable. Apple's never been noted for particularly buggy code, though OS X has had a fairly nasty number of things like kernel oopses since its introduction. So while it's not *that* out of line for issues to pop up in a youthful OS, the amazing thing is that this didn't show up before. /me thinks 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). They could still have plopped Carbon and Quartz and all their other goodies on top.

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...

Re: Why?

[capmilk]

You could not note this bug before, because it was introduced in 10.2.2. Let's hope it will be gone in 10.2.3.

Re:Why?

[susehat]

because they already had it! it was not "hacking up" , they just removed all 4.3BSD Tahoe code from it and added IOKit to the mix. XNU is very stable, and it would not make any sense to go with any other kernel, since you lose a lot of the goodies that made it so powerful. Wishful mod to you: 1, trollbait

Re:Why?

[stripes]

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.

Re:Why?

[Elwood P Dowd]

Well, Avie Tevinian probably doesn't agree with your "OS people up at Carnegie Mellon", and he's running the show over at Apple. He also wrote some pertinent versions of Mach, up at Carnegie Mellon.

When it comes to questions like this, if you can get the best people, using their prefered tools is often a good idea. If Apple could have hired all the architects of the freebsd Kernel, then sure, maybe you'd be right.

Also, I don't know what the hell you mean that you've "heard nothing but bad things about" Mach. It's a well known and well inspected peice of code. It might have problems, but saying "bad things" doesn't mean anything. What are the problems? Message passing is slow? This is true. Whatever. It's an architectural choice. Some of those architectural choices are exactly what makes Mach good for Apple - Multiple OS hosting.

Re:Why?

[KnotMe]

This looks more like the result of Apple's notably difficult attempt to get Unix to work with HFS+ than any problem with their kernel design.

Re:Why?

[Elwood P Dowd]

You learn something new every day...

smb bug? or maybe i'm an idiot

[drive]

perhaps off topic, but it will also cause kernel panic (at least in my network without fail).

try to mount a share from an local smb server that does not exist. cancel it, then try to mount one that DOES exist.

ie. from the finder command-k
smb://10.0.1.3 #does not exist
cancel it,

smb://10.0.1.4 #does exist

the second attempt will time out and the machine will have to be hard reset.

maybe this is just me, but this has been happening to me since 10.1.5

Fink/GNU is your friend

[bluestar]

Sure enough using /bin/mv it crashed as advertised.

But /sw/bin/mv, which is the GNU version of mv from the fileutils package, just gives a "cannot overwrite directory" error.

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).

Re:Fink/GNU is your friend

[Anonymous Coward]

That will not fix the problem. if a software use the Rename system call, the kernel will crash anyway. Even with the GNU vesion of mv

Re:Fink/GNU is your friend

[joto]

This is (one of the many reasons) why the GNU versions of everything should be standard on all systems in the universe.

No, it is not. While there are good reasons to prefer some GNU tools to some other tools under some circumstances, this is a bug that will be fixed soon enough. A user program should not be able to crash the kernel, and the fact that GNU mv seems to do some checks up front doesn't mean that it's actually better in any way (it might be better in other ways, however).

Also, "alias mv mv -i" is a Very Good Idea(tm)

No, again, it isn't. It gives you the habit of believing that mv is really mv -i. So whenever you use someone elses account, or are working on some other machine, you risk doing something really stupid.

Besides, I happen to quite often use a shared development account that for hysterical raisins have set exactly this alias in it's startup files. I've yet to find a time where it has been more useful than annoying, and I doubt I'll ever find it. If you are worried about deleting stuff, use backups.

Re:Fink/GNU is your friend

[norwoodites]

but the GNU version cannot rename files where the names only differ in case and that is where the bug is.

Re:Fink/GNU is your friend

[Pheersome]

I'd have to disagree with you there. I've had more than my share of problems with Fink (mostly involving XDarwin and ridiculous dependencies with teTeX), and I finally got fed up and ran 'sudo rm -rf /sw'. Since then I've found Darwinports (http://www.opendarwin.org/projects/darwinports/), which admittedly is a much younger project and has a smaller list of packages, but it hasn't fucked anything up on my system (yet). Happiness is running ethereal under OSX ;)

Re:Fink/GNU is your friend

[CableModemSniper]

Besides, I happen to quite often use a shared development account that for hysterical raisins have set exactly this alias in it's startup files. I've yet to find a time where it has been more useful than annoying, and I doubt I'll ever find it. If you are worried about deleting stuff, use backups.

I really, REALLY hope that was intentional...

Crashes just fine on my system...

[augros]

I run bash and the bug works beautifully well, I even gathered a crowd to witness it. Its immediateness is really amazing, a worthy watch. Maybe if you call Apple support they can help you to crash just like the rest of us.

Re:os9 never did that

[krel]

'hmmmph, this sounds like troll/flamebait' is referring to my rampant post

Re:Sure

[Ratso Baggins]

I understand the commands. I don't understand for the life of me why this warrants a PANIC!!!! ok a "denied" error response is UNDERSTANDABLE (well to me) this is just sloppy...

Cool.

[red5]

You should see the death screen. Very slick. I'd post a screen grab, but well you know. :)

Re:Cool.

[Have Blue]

What's even slicker is that the diagnostic output that used to go all over the screen was instead written to NVRAM, and moved out to disk (~/Library/Logs IIRC) when you rebooted.

Re:smb bug? or maybe i'm an idiot

[TMacPhail]

Better yet... If samba has shared user directories try this: Mount username's samba share (ie home directory) in ~/mnt/username/ Now try to cd ~/mnt/username/mnt/username/mnt/username Make sure you use some tab completions as well. At some point you will no longer be able to continue typing the command. ^C wont stop it either. Ok, so you now want to unmount it to try and stop it from happening again. Good luck. umount ~/mnt/username will end up locking up as well. Yet again ^C wont stop it.

Re:Sure

[qengho]

I understand the commands. I don't understand for the life of me why this warrants a PANIC!

Agreed. I was just responding to the troll about how this would ruin the lives of non-power users.

Use GNU fileutils-4.1 - Won't panic

[yngwie0]

I bulit and installed GNU fileutils 4.1 on my Mac OS X system some time ago (I wanted my Linux flavored fileutils!) and it turns out that they (mv) don't have this ...mv dirname .. problem. Try it!

Re:Use GNU fileutils-4.1 - Won't panic

[krray]

I couldn't get ANY of my Mac's to panic -- and figured out why... The fileutils package has long ago become "standard" on my Mac distributions thankfully (this time :).

Doesn't panic my kenel(s).

Re:mpderators?!?

[feldsteins]

Rise above your name, then maybe your criticizms will bite a little harder.

Re:smb bug? or maybe i'm an idiot

[drive]

try it and see. the result is the OS X equivalent to a BSOD in windows or the bomb icon in OS 9. the desktop will gray and a dialogue will appear (in a number of languages) telling you to hard reset.

Premiere?

[2nd Post!]

Why isn't Premiere in your cost when the 'equivalent' Mac has bundled iMovie and iDVD?

My $1500 933MHz G4 comes with iMovie, iDVD, and DVD-R. I don't have a DV-Analog converter in the system, but I do use my camcorder for that purpose.

For the 'average' joe who wants to buy a computer, buy a camcorder, make a movie, then burn a DVD, the iMac/eMac/PowerMac is still a great deal, in terms of learning curve, cost, effort, and ease of use.

Re:Premiere?

[isorox]

We'd use premiere on the mac if we'd gotten a mac - I admit I've never sued iMovie, but premiere is a low-end standard, used in many video editing shops. As a student TV station, we train our members up in programs they are likely to use. We dont use windows movie maker, we dont use ULead either. I'd guess that Mac-Premiere is the same cost as Windows-Premiere. The Analog-DV converter is essential because although we have a digital camera, it's nicer to use the dedicated converter as we can then use our large SVHS archive (and the two SVHS cameras), while the minidv cameras out and filming.

There is no doubt that with a less tight budget, a mac is a superior machine - My next personal machine (probably a laptop) will almost certainly be a mac - and I'd prefer to have a Mac at the station instead of a PC. Unfortunatly we couldnt afford it. Maybe fore the next machine.

What's wrong with HFS+?

[2nd Post!]

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...

Re:What's wrong with HFS+?

[tm2b]

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.

Re:What's wrong with HFS+?

[Hes Nikke]

POSIX compliance would be nice. snip Yes, you can use UFS filesystems under Mac OS X, but..will fail to run

FYI, one of the reasons why programs fail is because they aren't expecting case sensitivity. besides, case insisitivy is a good thing(TM)... do a google search

Re:What's wrong with HFS+?

[tm2b]

Actually, no, case insensitivity is a bad thing. Not for aesthetic reasons, but precisely because it violates POSIX.

Re:What's wrong with HFS+?

[Hes Nikke]

did you read what i wrote? i said that case sensitivity breaks things that don't expect case sensitivity (read anything that was written for the mac in the past 18 years) thats why MFS, HFS, HFS+ and HFS+Journeled don't support case sensitivity.

on top of that, any POSIX app that i've used still worries about case, it just gets an error if i try to creat 2 files with the same file name (foo and Foo) just as it would if i tried to create 2 files with the same case and name (Foo and Foo)

(btw, welcome to entry number 1 on my foes list - have a nice day)

Re:What's wrong with HFS+?

[anarkhos]

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?

Re:What's wrong with HFS+?

[longbottle]

What do I miss?

Speed.
Journaling (ok, you got me here)
Compression.
Encryption (do they? care to tell me how?)

Not much, but there it is.

Re:What's wrong with HFS+?

[Onan]

Speed: I spent a lot of time benchmarking UFS against HFS+ on osx about two years ago. Each was a little faster for some things, but they generally turned out to be comparable. You could argue that hfs+ suffers when compared against filesystems specifically designed for speed, eg reiser, but it's certainly not outside the normal range of speeds for unix filesystems. In nearly all cases, you're bottlenecking on your storage device.

Journalling: As you point out, no longer a valid complaint.

Compression and encryption can be handled nicely by using disk images, rather than filesystems directly on disks. I keep a compressed, AES-encrypted copy of my home directory on my ipod, created and accessed using nothing beyond the standard gui tools.

Re:What's wrong with HFS+?

[Eravau]

POSIX is all fine and dandy, but not a be all and end all measurement of a perfect system.

As for case sensitivity..I don't think any normal desktop system has any business being case sensitive. Getting users to find the proper files on their hard drives is hard enough without having to say...

"Click on the file called 'Control File'. No, not that one, the one with that's capitalized."

Normal humans just don't see a difference between the two words 'control' and 'Control'. They're the same word. With the ability to have 250-ish character file names, if you can't find some way to differentiate your file names with something besides character case, you need to take a break from your computer or something.

journalling

[owenc]

It would be smart to enable journalling before doing this:
sudo diskutil enablejournal /

Re:journalling

[GavK]

Thanks for that, I hadn't bothered to look into it yet... If only I had mod points!

Another bug.

[jericho4.0]

This page, a browser test page for png images, instantly crashes IE on Jaguar. Kind of funny considering that IE on OS X has far better png support than the windows version.

Overall, I've found OS X to be a wonderfully stable product, and have never seen a kernel panic.

Re:Another bug.

[Huge Pi Removal]

Wow, so it does. Works fine in Omniweb though.

What's hard about png implementation again? I don't get it...

Re:Another bug.

[anarkhos]

A possible fix is using QuickTime plugin to view png images

Re:Another bug.

[huginOGmunin]

That page hard crashes IE (5.2 and 5.1) under MacOS 9. tried 3 quicksilvers

go back! it's a BJ!

Don't you get it?

[WebBug]

I must admit to being somewhat taken aback by the comments here . . .

While this bug appears trivial it is not.

Consider: An entire apple server can be totally killed requiring a human to reboot it just by getting a totally unpriveleged shell access.

EVEN A GUEST can kill the system using this simple simple set of commands. That's not good. Of course it's not the end of the world either.

anyone know of a way to get unprivileged access on an apple server of your choice?!

Re:Don't you get it?

[red5]

I'm ashamed to say that it never crossed my mind. I guess I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the idea of a mac as a UNIX server.

Re:Don't you get it?

[krray]

anyone know of a way to get unprivileged access on an apple server of your choice?!

$ su -l

Password: (enter the root password here)

#

...you did enable the root user through NetInfo, right? :)

Re:Don't you get it?

[Tokerat]

No no no... unprivledged access. Any user. I just tested this with the root account, my acccount which is in the admin group, and a plain account. All worked.

This needs to be fixed immidiately.

I just tested this over FTP. Boom.

Re:Don't you get it?

[WebBug]

Exactly my point!

any user that can create a directory can EASILY kill your server! DEAD DEAD DEAD!

Another easy one

[Wesley Felter]

Try changing an Ethernet interface's MAC address using ifconfig. Whoops.

Re:mail info

[MoneyT]

A troll feeding we will go, a troll feeding we will go, hi ho the derio (WTF is that anyways?) a troll feeding we will go.

What's also amusing is, children have no problem using dos, linux, windows, MacOS or OSX. They have no preference to OS as long as it can play sound, let them personalise their desktop etc. what they favour is SOFTWARE

Yet for some unknown reason, if you put an average highschool computer user who's grown up on a windows PC all his life in front of a mac, and open up netscape, they can't seem to figure out how to make it work, despite it having an identical interface to the PC version. The reason I was given was becasue "It's a mac, I don't know how to use a mac"

Re:Works just fine on my system.... (in Bash, thou

[usr122122121]

Are you sure that

1. You have the correct permissions to the folder, and
2. You are running 10.2.2?

Don't you find it the least bit funny that you're trying to help him to cause a kernel panic on his computer?

"DAMN, sticking that fork in my eye really hurt!"
"Oooh, I WANT TO TRY!"

Works fine with UFS filesystem...

[Anonymous Coward]

I finally feel better about formatting my disk UFS rather than HFS+. Now if they would just improve the performance...

Re:Works fine with UFS filesystem...

[anarkhos]

The poor performance of UFS isn't Apple's fault.

Why would anybody use UFS anyway?

Re:Works fine with UFS filesystem...

[c13v3rm0nk3y]

Except a good chunk of native Apple apps are either untested on UFS, or specifically will not work on UFS (according to a few READMEs I've read lately).

For example, isn't Mozilla unhappy on UFS?

I suppose you can have an HFS+ partition for some apps, but this sounds like altogether too much work to me.

Re:os9 never did that

[sco08y]

OS 9 didn't have memory protection. Memory was a flat 32-bit address space, shared by all processes.

There was preemptive multitasking, and asymetric multiprocessing. Essentially, all the normal applications ran in a single task and you could write preemptive services. I never saw this feature used for anything productive. Since QuickDraw was only available to the main task, you'd probably have to use IPC to have your services do their output.

OS 9 would never do that because its filesystem code was highly refined, after all, it was the 7th or 8th major revision of the OS. (I'm pretty sure we jumped from either System 1 or 2 to System 4. I don't remember System 5, so maybe it was only the 6th.) However, I do recall that the PC Exchange software was pretty flaky and some bad DOS floppies could crash your Mac.

Also, there was a horrible Quicktime Autoplay feature that was designed for CD-ROMs. Some people used it to put viruses on Zip disks that would activate merely by inserting the Zip.

All in all, OS X is, so far, doing a good bit better than its predecessors.

Re:os9 never did that

[dr00g911]

My question, then, is... where are the little twin Japanese girls?!?!?

They've been called the Cosmos lately and stuff since the kiddy-Mothra movies came out, but really!

THEY would guarantee complete and utter platform dominance if they were included as a feature!

(insert your own puns here, people...)

But, hell, I'm content with my 110 days of uptime since my last rebootable update.

[OT]
Not sure why anyone complains about the restarts required of their Macs these days. After that long, I'm fairly certain that Kaiko (yes, I named my "windtunnel") could use a break...
[/OT]

Re:os9 never did that

[krel]

ok, yes, fine, os 9 is a horrendous excuse for an operating system, but it was an enjoyable one nonetheless. I mean memory protection insofar as trusting each application to not overstep its allocation.
they didn't even have that problem in system 0.1 (because the mfs drive format only allowed one directory level above root). and same through 1 and 2, i think 3 was where hfs came in. 4 didn't have any new features, 5 was more stable, 6 packed a wallop etc...
actually i collect these operating systems ;-)
-krel

Mod this up.

[samuel4242]

Thanks for the info. I'm getting fink again as we speak!

Re:os9 never did that

[Melantha_Bacchae]

dr00g911 wrote:

> My question, then, is... where are the little
> twin Japanese girls?!?!?
>
> They've been called the Cosmos lately and stuff
> since the kiddy-Mothra movies came out, but
> really!

The general name is "shobijin" (means "little beauty"), fairy, or fairy priestess.

In 1992 and 1994, they were the Series 2 Mothra's Cosmos.

In the Legend of the Protecting Goddess Mothra Leo (the late 90's Mothra trilogy) they were the Elias (pronounced like English "alias", with probably the same meaning).

The Mothra of Nilai Kanai (appeared as a moth in the picture on the wall inside the pyramid, and as the horribly mutated Dagara: "da"=corrupted, "ga"=moth, "ra"=Malay "lah" particle) had a human sized shobijin called "Kona" or "the Queen" in the Japanese version, "the Princess" in the American version of "Rebirth of Mothra 2".

Mothra of Yamato (GMK) shared Yuri Tachibana as her shobijin with Baragon and King Ghidora. Yuri could also telepathically sense Godzilla.

> THEY would guarantee complete and utter platform
> dominance if they were included as a feature!

Where do you think Belebera is? Mothra Leo sent her to Apple at the end of "Mothra 3" where she could put her technology skills to good use without getting into trouble.

I still wish Apple would port that telepathic interface to OS X. You know, the one the Elias and Fairy used to communicate with Ghogo on the screen of that Mac in "Rebirth of Mothra 2". OS 9 just had all kinds of features that are taking a while to get to OS X. ;)

Mothra or Godzilla should do a Switch ad. Oh, yeah, that's right. Godzilla already did one. It was called "Godzilla 2000". Switch or he will stomp you. ;)

"What I'm thinking is different from what you are."
Belabera, "Mothra 3" 1998

"Your way of thinking is completely different from mine!"
Shinoda, "Godzilla 2000 Millennium" (Japanese version)

mv run on an SMB share also caused a panic

[c13v3rm0nk3y]

I was able to cause a panic in 10.1.x by simply moving all files out of the root of an SMB share on a foreign host from the Terminal. I was able to duplicate at will, and did submit to Apple at one time.

No problem copying and removing the files from the terminal (using the same filespecs). Only the "mv" command would do it.

I have no idea of this was fixed in a later release of 10.1 or 10.2.

Re:mv run on an SMB share also caused a panic

[protohiro1]

There could be a book called "SMB related stuff that crashes Mac OS X". SMB is just not 100% there on os x. The only thing on my tibook that makes me want to kill it.

Re:mv run on an SMB share also caused a panic

[c13v3rm0nk3y]

True enough. Jaguar made some real advances, and the raw ability seems to be there, but it is not exactly the happiest thing to configure.

I've managed to get my OS X boxes to talk to my UNIX server via SMB with proper authentication on a specific workgroup. I'm a pretty smart cookie, though, and don't mind trolling the web for answers, which I had to do.

There is certainly a lot of room for improvement, though. The best news is that SMB support in OS X is just Samba, which means it can always be figured out by anyone with a bit of time, and it can only get better. I haven't found a panic anywhere else in SMB, and I've excercised it pretty well.

Look at me, being all positive on Monday morning!

Re:smb bug? or maybe i'm an idiot

[hayne]

I reported this bug to Apple quite a while ago and was informed that this bug was already known to them.

this must just be 10.2

[generationxyu]

i just tried in 10.1.5... nothing. i think the second mydir that was created just disappeared. someone should tell apple though.

Re:os9 never did that

[rjung2k]

ok, yes, fine, os 9 is a horrendous excuse for an operating system, but it was an enjoyable one nonetheless.

I had lots of enjoyable computing experiences with my old Atari 800, but I wouldn't want to use it as my everyday computer in this day and age.

Another cool Kernel panic

[mkiwi]

I was able to cause a great kernel panic with 10.1, and reproduce it all the time. I'm not sure if it still works, but if one took Netscape 4.7 in classic and went to http://localhost/, assuming an apache web server were running, there was an instant kernel panic.

I sent an email to Apple awhile back, so it may be fixed; however, I have not tested this bug recently, as I cannot stand opening Classic anymore T.t

Re:mail info

[mackstann]

Just thought i'd help a brother out, it's actually "dairy-o" (the o is just for fun i guess), not derio. Hope this helps.

if you *really* want to see a kernel panic

[commodoresloat]

threaten a Congressional investigation into his mens' use of military-issued credit cards.

oh, wait, that's a Colonel....

Re:mail info

[rakslice]

Erm... Could this be about the "not enough mouse buttons"/"too many mouse buttons" divide?

Re:mail info

[MoneyT]

I would have thought that too, but the kid honestly did not seem to be able to figure out how he was supposed to navigate.

WARNING: SHUT DOWN YOUR FTP DAEMON

[Tokerat]

I just tested this over an FTP connection to a Mac OS X 10.2.2 box using Transmit (a Mac FTP client) from a MacOS 9 machine.

I was ABLE to panic the kernel remotely.

This has just taken a violent swing into serious, as ANY USER WITH FTP ACCESS can now drop your Mac OS X machine. Apple needs to patch this, and quickly. I don't care if the security update is 15k to replace /bin/mv, anyone who has an FTP cannot live like this.

Any idea what eactly could be wrong with either the kernel or mv that would cause such a problem? Branching to the wrong case (i.e. branching to the "same name" case as opposed to the "can't replace a directory with an item it contains" case)?

Is this a job for the Darwin team since it involves a BSD component?

Re:mail info

[jaoswald]

You're both wrong.

Heigh-ho, the derry-o.

Heigh-ho is in Shakespeare, as an interjection.
Derry, possibly as in county Derry?

Re:mail info

[mackstann]

seems questionable....

farmer....dairy..makes sense!

farmer....derry?

Re:mail info

[ernst_mulder]

Unfortunately that's not funny, its plain sad, and I've seen it happen many times. My father and father-in-law both use PC's and can't seen to get anything done on my Mac. Yes, even if you open up Mozilla for them. They look with wide open eyes, move slowly with the mouse not daring to click on anything. And can't seem to find the menu bar :-)

Yet for some unknown reason, if you put an average highschool computer user who's grown up on a windows PC all his life in front of a mac, and open up netscape, they can't seem to figure out how to make it work, despite it having an identical interface to the PC version. The reason I was given was becasue "It's a mac, I don't know how to use a mac"

Re:Works just fine on my system.... (in Bash, thou

[zman99]

Don't you find it the least bit funny that you're trying to help him to cause a kernel panic on his computer?

Hey, this is OS X we're talking about here. Unlike in the Windows world, you really gotta put some effort into making the system crash.

It's damn funny what a novelty it is to us OS X users to see the system crash....I did it.....just for fun.

-Z

Re:os9 never did that

[sco08y]

Actually, I thought 9 was really good. Granted, it was hefty, but they had finally finished a lot of what they started with 7. AppleScript was very mature, for example, and virtually no 68K legacy code was to be found.

The reason Classic Mac OS stuck around so long was that they made a lot of good design decisions, and most of the apps really were pretty stable.

Yes it works in 'console'.

[EggZact]

As some of you may know, you can use the equivalent of Terminal.app without logging into OS X by logging in as >console it will take you to a BSD style login prompt where you have to login and can still render the same results featured in this article.