Hey, internet. Long time no see.

(It’s often claimed “long time no see” is a literal translation from Chinese “好久不见”, “hǎo jiǔ bú jiàn”, but actually nobody knows for sure.)

On Thursday, my computer crashed. Not just that it crashed, but it somehow corrupted itself so that I couldn’t even boot it. It survived for two seconds after being turned on, before bailing out with this error:

init[1]: segfault at 0 ip 00007ff10ea3fe05 sp 0007ffff7cb49148 error 4 in libc-2.19.so[7ff10e919000+19e000]
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! exitcode=0x0000000b

This is so early in the startup process that nothing is running. It’s pretty much just the kernel and init (which, if you don’t know, is the very first program to run when a Linux system starts, the one that runs all other programs).

So of course I recompiled (it’s Gentoo) and reinstalled both the kernel and init, as well as libc, several times, as well as several other programs that I’m pretty sure didn’t even get a chance to start, so how could they have anything to do with this crash? Still, better safe than sorry I guess …