Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2011 15:05:56 -0800
From: Wayne Hayes <wayne AT ics DOT uci DOT edu>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: "Bad Address" error from random executables causing freezes after "upgrading" to Win7
Message-ID: <20110213230556.GA24797@rodan.ics.uci.edu>
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Folks,

I recently upgraded to Windows 7.  Before that I was running XP with Cygwin 5.1.
(I can't give you the exact version because it's now gone).  I have scripts
running in the background constantly doing things like downloading news, uploading
my current dynamic IP to another machine, running a nigthly unison, etc.  Immediately
after upgrading to Windows 7, I started seeing very infrequent errors like the following:

    [... a few minutes of execution without errors ...]
    /home/wayne/bin/quote: line 8: /usr/bin/date: Bad address
    [... a few more minutes of execution without errors ... ]
    /home/wayne/bin/quote: line 74: /usr/bin/tr: Bad address
    [... a few more minutes of execution without errors ... ]
    bash: /home/wayne/bin/quote: /bin/sh: bad interpreter: Bad address
    /home/wayne/bin/quote: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
    /home/wayne/bin/quote: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
    /home/wayne/bin/quote: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
    /home/wayne/bin/quote: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

Note that the error is coming from random executables called from my scripts.
Now, the "fork: Resource temporarily unavaible" errors I've seen before, ongoing
for years, and they're annoying but not critical because execution would always
continue.  I would also consider these "Bad address" errors not to be crucial except
occasionally they cause my script to just freeze up and stop dead.  Not good since
I need these scripts to be running continuously.

The first thing I did was upgrade from Cygwin 5.1 to 6.1, the most recent stable
release.  It didn't solve the problem.  Then I tried re-compiling all my own personal
executables.  No luck.  Then I found a description of a similar problem back in
August on this list,

    http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2010-08/msg00277.html

where Corinna Vinschen suggested getting the most recent developer version.  I
assumed this means cygwin1.dll.  So I went and got the most recent developer
version, which is 13 February 2011, and I downloaded and un-tar'd

    http://cygwin.org/snapshots/cygwin-inst-20110213.tar.bz2

Then I rebooted.  No luck.  The problem persists.

This is what "uname -a" now says:

    CYGWIN_NT-6.1 pisa 1.7.8s(0.236/5/3) 20110213 16:43:51 i686 Cygwin

Has anybody else encountered this problem?  Any clue as to what's causing it?

-- 
Wayne Hayes, Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department.
4092 Bren Hall, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-3435.
e-mail: wayne AT ics DOT uci DOT edu; Office Phone: +1-949-824-1753
"Base 10 sucks.  If God had been a decent mathematician,
he would've given us 12 fingers instead of 10." - unknown

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