Help decipher error? message in system log file

ruidoso48

Since upgrading to Tiger I get the following message 25-50 times and wonder if this is slowing down the system. What follows the message is not the same so I'm not sure which process is stopping this if any or is it just 'giving up":



/usr/sbin/update: FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "

/usr/sbin/update: FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "



and what is UTF-8?



Thanks for any help

shetline

I'm not sure what the error message in about, but UTF-8 is a character encoding standard for representing Unicode text in byte-oriented streams. The encoding allows the most basic characters (essentially olde-fashioned ASCII) to be encoded as single bytes, most of what you need for major European languages, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic and a few others as two bytes, and the rest of the 16-bit Unicode character set as using three bytes per character.



At any rate, this would be the first time I've seen an error message where OS X complains about something it expects to be UTF-8 not being valid UTF-8.

lundy

I would ignore it. There are thousands of "errata" in the OS and it seems as if this is one of them. Note how the engineers have it tagged "FIXME" to differentiate it from the slew of other "error" messages in the Console Log.



I looked through the BSD routine "update", which really only calls another BSD routine "Sync", which makes sure that all disk writes have been flushed out of the write buffers onto the actual disk. You can type "/usr/sbin/update" in the Terminal and hear the hard disk mumble as it gets the flushed data.



The error message that you posted is not part of the binary file "update", so it must come from a lower-level system routine.



You can file a bug on it and they will sometimes get back to you - you need a free ADC account (connect.apple.com) and go to bugreporter.apple.com.

ruidoso48

Thanks for the replies. I'm going to leave well enough alone and maybe toward the end of the Tiger upgrade cycle do a clean install and see if it doesn't just disappear.