Bug#890873: lintian: gcc-8-cross-ports makes lintian fork-bomb, consume all memory and fill the disk

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

Niels Thykier:
> Package: lintian
> Version: 2.5.74
> Severity: important
> 
> Seen twice on lindsay.d.o in the last 24 hours.  The exact reason is
> unknown, but it is probably during the unpacker (last non-error in the
> log is lintian starting the unpack, plus previously we had a race-condition
> in the unpacker that could trigger a similar fork-bomp situation).
> 
> Most likely we never fixed this condition and only made it
> "sufficiently unlikely" until gcc-8-cross-ports showed up.
> 
> 
> For now, I have disabled the crontab on lindsay.d.o to avoid it taking
> down our host.
> 
> Thanks,
> ~Niels
> 

Btw, I got an old prototype rewrite where the custom parallelization
handling is replaced by IO::Async in
https://anonscm.debian.org/git/users/nthykier/lintian.git/log/?h=unpacker-io-async

No clue if this handles this particular problem, but I wanted to
mentioned it in case someone else got the same idea of rewriting things
to use IO::Async.

Thanks,
~Niels