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I have unpacked my vmlinuz into a vmlinux and tried to execute it, just to see what would happen. However, the binary gets SIGKILL on startup!

Why does this happen?

I was expecting a SIGILL (kernel tries to do something that is not allowed in user space) or a SIGSEGV (trying to access kernel memory not allowed in user-mode not allowed to access), but not a SIGKILL!

Is the process sending SIGKILL to itself, or is it being killed? GDB doesn't help -- the message is During startup program terminated with signal SIGKILL, Killed.

The max resident memory is only 412kB per /bin/time so the OOM killer is not the culprit. In fact, the SIGKILL is sent even if I have the OOM killer disabled by echo 2 | sudo dd of=/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory.

Demi
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  • It would appear that whatever happens is happening before execution ever reaches the entry point address - ie, none of code is executed. An obvious guess would be that the elf sections specified for loading into kernel reserved regions are not permitted to user mode programs. – Chris Stratton Aug 13 '14 at 20:30
  • @ChrisStratton you are correct -- I think it is trying to load into a forbidden address. – Demi Aug 23 '14 at 16:02

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