Bug#174521: libc6: threads on ppc leave zombies when they terminate
On Fri, Dec 27, 2002 at 09:53:32PM -0700, Will Aoki wrote:
> Package: libc6
> Version: 2.2.5-11.2
> Severity: important
>
> On powerpc, when threads terminate, they leave behind zombies. This
> renders maradns and other programs that have "safety brakes" to keep
> them from spawning too many threads unusable, limits the number of
> threads that any process can create during its lifetime (even if it
> never has more than a few at any one time), and can lead to a denial of
> service when a long-running threaded process hits the process limit.
>
> I've observed this in mozilla, maradns, and xmms, always on powerpc and
> never on other architectures (that I have access to). I'm not aware of
> any pthreaded programs that don't do this, so I've concluded that it's
> likely to be a libc bug, not a programming error in the various
> programs.
>
> Ways to reproduce:
> 1 - sample code below
> 2 - run mozilla, open some new windows, then close them again
> 3 - run xmms, play a file, hit stop
> 4 - launch maradns, perform some recursive queries
>
> Here is some example code. On i386 and sparc, it dosen't cause zombies,
> but on ppc, it generates zombies. (I'm not confident that my sample code
> is completely correct, as I'm not familiar with pthreads, but it does
> demonstrate the same problem I've seen in other programs.)
Not on my PPC. This seems more likely to be a bug in the benh kernel
you're running; I've never seen it, on glibc 2.2.5 or 2.3.1 on PPC.
--
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer
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