bad awk output on vkernel

[Matthew Dillon]

:I'd like to add this as a bug so as it's not forgotten, or attract
:someone else's attention.  It also seems to affect pkgsrc packages
:using awk in its configure script, for instance.
:
:> I'd say it's not a pipe issue, but specific to running awk on vkernel,
:> because this perl version never produces bad output on vkernel:
:> 

    I've reproduced the problem in the vkernel.

    I reproduced your sorting test, where commenting out the
    core of the sort code makes the problem occur less often.
    When it did mess up I got:

    f056eddb732fb0e453dcab96508dc73a
    f056eddb732fb0e453dcab96508dc73a
    f056eddb732fb0e453dcab96508dc73a
    f056eddb732fb0e453dcab96508dc73a
    /usr/bin/awk: trying to access out of range field -2147483648
     input record number 819, file common.opt
      source line number 41

    I replaced the /bin/sh last=`...` backtick assignment with a
    redirect to a file and that file showed corruption, so we can
    rule out /bin/sh's variable assignment.

    I think what we are seeing is either VM memory corruption in the
    vkernel implementation, which seems unlikely because the VM system
    is not being stressed, or execution state corruption.  I kinda
    suspect the cpu flags... maybe the direction flag is getting
    corrupted.  I am looking into it.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at backplane.com>