Weird problem with 2.4.4-pre6

[Tobias Ringstrom]

Yesterday, I was running tcpdump, paging the output with less.  All of a
sudden, less started to dump core (SIGSEGV).  I could not even start less
by itself:

    > less

without it getting a SIGSEGV, and in fact no user could run less without
getting a SIGSEGV, but it did work perfectly a few minutes earlier.  This
morning, I tried to run less again, and now it was working!  No core
dumps!

How can this happen?  Something overwriting the page/buffer cache?
Unfortunately, I don't know how to reproduce it.  I'm writing this because
it was so strange that I felt I had to share it.  There are no messages in
the (dmesg) log.

/Tobias, a little bit worried

Semi-random info:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440FX - 82441FX PMC [Natoma] (rev 02)
00:07.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82371SB PIIX3 ISA [Natoma/Triton II] (rev 01)
00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371SB PIIX3 IDE [Natoma/Triton II]
00:07.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82371SB PIIX3 USB [Natoma/Triton II] (rev 01)
00:0b.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc 210888GX [Mach64 GX] (rev 01)
00:0f.0 Ethernet controller: Davicom Semiconductor, Inc. Ethernet 100/10 MBit (rev 31)
00:11.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905C-TX [Fast Etherlink] (rev 74)

hda is running with DMA enabled in mdma2 mode.