[erlang-questions] beam[8449]: segfault at 0 ip 0000000000437e10 sp 00007fffce250948 error 4 in beam[400000+174000]

[Mikael Pettersson]

Eric Liang wrote:
> Hi all,
>     I got the message( from /var/log/messages ) when I was benchmarking
> the ejabberd:
> 
>     May 24 14:55:26 dev-3 kernel: [264002.592197] beam[8449]: segfault
>     at 0 ip 0000000000437e10 sp 00007fffce250948 error 4 in
>     beam[400000+174000]
> 
>     While the ejabberd server works well, I am still curious about this
> message: what does it mean? and what can I do from this? However, any
> interesting information is appreciated, TIA.

It means an instance of the beam VM crashed with a NULL pointer dereference
at instruction address 0x437e10.  The large value for the stack pointer
indicates that it's a 64-bit beam VM not a 32-bit one.  It looks like a
uni-processor version, otherwise the executable should have been `beam.smp'.

If you want help to debug this, please give us some more information:
1. which version of Erlang/OTP is this?
2. what CPU type and OS was this executed on?
3. what tools (esp. gcc version) was this built with?
4. using gdb or objdump on the `beam' executable, can you
   provide a disassembly of the procedure surrounding 0x437e10?