Bug#226688: libc6: i386: __libc_fork assertion in 2.3.2.ds1-10

[Mark Sheppard <mark@ddf.net>]

On 2004-01-07 (Wednesday) at 22:39:18 -0500, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 08:04:17PM +0000, Mark Sheppard wrote:
> >
> > I'm getting the same behaviour as the bug in report #218546.  All
> > commands that use fork() fail with:
> >
> >   ../nptl/sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/fork.c:132: __libc_fork: Assertion
[...]
> > Looks like the hosting company installed a custom kernel:
> >
> >   Linux mail 2.4.18200310143 #1 Fri Oct 24 14:42:51 BST 2003 i686 unknown
>
[...]
>
> Um.... I really, really don't want to work around that.  It's a
> completely broken kernel version.  What do you expect anything else
> that checks the kernel version string to do?

Fair enough if you need to parse the whole thing, but from what you've
said it sounds like you don't have to:

  The code in ld.so is supposed to choose the copy of libc in /lib for
  any kernel version less than 2.6.0

Maybe I'm missing something here, but couldn't you just check the
major and minor version numbers and totally ignore the revision number
(i.e. anything beyond the second ".")?  Or if this is something that
changed half way through the 2.5 kernels then you could only check the
revision if major == 2 && minor == 5?

Mark.