[Dovecot] Panic: Trying to allocate 2147483648 bytes

David Halik dhalik at jla.rutgers.edu
Tue Mar 24 23:24:29 EET 2009


Unfortunately, the patch didn't help, BUT I've discovered some very 
interesting things along the way that I think you'd like to hear:

1) The problem stems from certain emails with odd or badly formed 
characters.

The reason I wasn't seeing it on one machine was because I was using a 
different folder to test with. Once I moved over that folder the same 
issue occurred. This got me thinking...

2) This is *not* a localized Solaris issue, I can replicate the problem 
on my Fedora 10 i386 workstation with the stock F10 1.1.10 package.

On Linux at least for me), however, it doesn't grow and grow, it just 
dies and core dumps immediately once it hits an email it doesn't like:

Mar 24 17:03:11 gunslinger IMAP(dhalik): : Panic: Trying to allocate 
2147483648 bytes

Here is the backtrace from Fedora 10:

http://pastebin.com/m66d94564

To help you out I'm going to give you the email folder that I have been 
using to replicate this. It's just a maildir format spam folder, so no 
sensitive emails... just lots and lots of junk. =) You should be able to 
replicate it without a problem.

http://jla.rutgers.edu/~dhalik/spamfolder.tar.gz

Steps to reproduce:

$ /usr/sbin/dovecot --exec-mail imap
* PREAUTH [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 SASL-IR SORT THREAD=REFERENCES 
MULTIAPPEND UNSELECT LITERAL+ IDLE CHILDREN NAMESPACE LOGIN-REFERRALS 
UIDPLUS LIST-EXTENDED I18NLEVEL=1 QUOTA] Logged in as dhalik
1 SELECT INBOX.AUTO-DELETED-SPAM
* FLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Deleted \Seen \Draft $Forwarded)
* OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Deleted \Seen \Draft 
$Forwarded)] Flags permitted.
* 1468 EXISTS
* 2 RECENT
* OK [UNSEEN 1] First unseen.
* OK [UIDVALIDITY 1214858211] UIDs valid
* OK [UIDNEXT 33722] Predicted next UID
1 OK [READ-WRITE] Select completed.
2 SEARCH BODY "berry"    Aborted (core dumped)

Thanks again Timo,
-Dave


Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-03-21 at 18:58 -0400, David Halik wrote:
>   
>> Mar 21 18:43:57 er0.rutgers.edu IMAP(dhalik): : [ID 107833 mail.crit] 
>> Panic: Trying to allocate 2147483648 bytes
>>     
>
> Attached patch probably helps?
>
>   


-- 
================================
David Halik
System Administrator
OIT-CSS Rutgers University
dhalik at jla.rutgers.edu
================================



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