Hardware problems can sometimes causes problems that look like software faults. In QNX support, we recently closed a case which had been ongoing for a long time. The disk driver was crashing periodically under load, with a SIGSEGV error. SIGSEGV is a memory segment violation, and is using indicative of code in the process overwriting memory not belonging to it. As a result, debugging effort was focused on what the disk driver could be doing wrong.
It turned out that the problem was not with the driver, but with a bad memory setup. When one of the two SODIMMs on the particular board was removed, the problem went away. The problem was likely isolated to the disk driver because it was using a large amount of memory, relative to the other processes in the system, for it's disk cache.
This goes to show that when certain hardware problems exist, software can't work the way it is necessarily supposed to. It also suggests that when an elusive problem is found, general check-ups and diagnostics on the hardware way be warranted.
NOTE: This entry has been validated against the SDP version listed above. Use caution when considering this advice for any other SDP version. For supported releases, please reach out to QNX Technical Support if you have any questions/concerns.
