huelsbec@cinemax.UUCP (David Huelsbeck) (06/27/90)
Server: NeWS 1.1 OS: SunOS 4.0.3 Mach: Sun 4/260 I'm hoping someone out there might be able to give me some insight about what causes NeWS to crash with the message "Illegal Instruction." I've done strings on the NeWS server and it's not in there. My guess is that NeWS (the server) gets so hosed up internally under certain conditions that it causes a SIGILL to be generated, which it does not handle, so the server is killed by the kernel. This makes it kind of difficult to debug. I know that this bug can be caused by reading from a file when that file has no bytes available. While that is certainly something a well written program should not do, I think that blowing up completely is a less then wonderful means of reporting the problem. Unfortunately it seems that this problem can be generated by other less debuggable means. I have a program that seems to cause this to happen only on some machines and only when certain other programs are running at the same time. Worse yet it doesn't occur during the normal operation of the program but rather it happens when the program is exiting following the user selecting "Zap" from the program's main menu. It seems to happen sometimes when children (windows) of the main window are destroyed. (Very Nice!) I called Sun but I didn't have much luck. The person I talked with tried to be helpful but really didn't know anything about NeWS internals. She said that she did not have access to the source code and she was not in a position to call and ask anyone that did. So it seems that none of the people who are qualified to answer my questions can be bothered with them. So I'm mailing in hopes of contacting someone who might have some insight into what might be happening inside the NeWS server. Since in this case it would be nearly impossible to figure out exactly what piece of code is causing the problem I'm hoping more for some general information about "Illegal Instruction", and how to debug it, than I am for a specific solution to this instance of the problem. Thank you, David Huelsbeck Applied Computing Systems, Inc. 505/662-3309 WARNING: Long complaint follows. If someone who actually works on NeWS at Sun sees this and thinks that maybe there should be some kind of official channel of communication for problems like this I'd be more than happy to put you in touch with the poor folks in your customer support group. So far I've received both apologies and expressions of embarrassment at their impotence to help me from both the people at the 1-800-USA-4SUN number, who said that the windows support people never seem to answer customer calls and they feel bad because they don't know what to tell the customers when they call back wondering why no one has called them, and from the people in windows support who've told me that they don't currently have a NeWS guru that they can ask questions of, don't have access to source code, and aren't allowed to call the people who do and ask them. Perhaps the word seems kind of strong but the only word I can think of to describe this system for customer support is 'stupid.' How could these poor people possibly be expected to support a product when they can't even get in touch with the people who actually work on it? I realize it's a bother for coders to do customer support but it seems like there should at least be a way for customer support people to get the answers to questions that they don't know. Does that really seem unreasonable?