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Date:      Mon, 21 Jul 1997 19:10:30 +0200 (MET DST)
From:      Wolfgang Helbig <helbig@MX.BA-Stuttgart.De>
To:        lgk@eiche.bik-gmbh.de (Lars Gerhard Kuehl)
Cc:        helbig@MX.BA-Stuttgart.De, asami@cs.berkeley.edu, ports@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: ports/3927: xview library fails on -current and on 2.2.x
Message-ID:  <199707211710.TAA20264@helbig.informatik.ba-stuttgart.de>
In-Reply-To: <199707211151.NAA00300@eiche.bik-gmbh.de> from Lars Gerhard Kuehl at "Jul 21, 97 01:51:48 pm"

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> > >  * The "notifier: bad file number" message and subsequent segmentation
> > >  * fault still occurs on any xview-lib client if the 2.2.2- built
> > >  * xview-lib package is used. But this error only shows if the process
> > >  * uid is zero, i. e.  if you launch the xview application as root.
> > > 
> > > Really?  I saw this before when I was running workman as non-root.
> > 
> > Puh--finally someone else saw this phaenomenon! I already started
> > to believe seeing things :-) It was just me and someone from
> > the questions list that reported this xview-lib problem and everyone
> > else said: ''works fine on my system''.
> 
> Well, that looks quite more complicated to me:

:-(

> After an upgrade to 2.2.2-RELEASE I saw all xview clients crashing
> in notify_start() quite independent on the uid. Curiously this
> does not happen if the programs are called in the CDE - so far
> the uid is not 0. ;-)
> The crashes are caused by a damaged stack, the return address
> from (randomly different) functions called by notify_start()
> is 0x0. The proplems arose without installing new xview binaries,
> even the libs were the same which could be used under 2.2.1-RELEASE
> flawlessly.
> 
> I tried that with XF86-3.3 libs, older 3.2 libs and the X libraries
> delivered with CDE 1.0.10, I reinstalled and rebuilt the xview libs
> and clients - the scarcely desired behaviour does not change.
> 
> BTW, since installing 2.2.2-RELEASE kaffe is crashing, but haven't
> yet spent any time to investigate it.
> And not to forget all that happens only on a single machine. I can access
> several others running 2.2.2-RELEASE, where all xview applications
> and kaffe work as expected.
> 
> Happy investigations :-)

Thanks for the info! That makes me try harder to pin it down.

What happens if you use the xview-package built on a -current
system? One difference is the value of FD_SETSIZE, which changed
from 256 (on 2.2.2) to 1024 (on -current). FD_SETSIZE is #defined
in /usr/include/sys/types.h, it controls the size of quite a few
local variables in the notify subtree of the xview-lib. The larger
variables might protect the return addresses in the stack frame
from being overwritten and the bug is hidden on -current systems.

Wolfgang



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