Crash!

13 Jun 2004 · #techtalk

This morning (afternoon actually!), I came across this piece of code which is nothing more than 20 odd lines of C and a couple of lines of inline assembly.

Now compiling this with gcc 3.3 or gcc 3.3.2 (which is what I have) and executing the code locks up the system like a dead cockroach. I tried it and got some kind of console race condition. My knowledge of matters Assembly is borderline zero, so I have no idea what this code does; nor can I make any sense of possible patches being discussed here. You don’t need root privileges, just regular shell access with execute permission and you can make an ice kachang of the system. Freaky!

More details including a list of unaffected kernels here.