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

[Olly Betts <olly@survex.com>]

On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 07:48:31AM +0100, Niels Thykier wrote:
> 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.

I tried to build the wxwidgets3.0 3.0.4+dfsg-1 in an unstable chroot a
couple of days ago.  I use sbuild and it's configured to run lintian in
the chroot on the built packages.  However lintian ran out of disk space
in the chroot, which isn't something I have hit before.  And I would
expect the build itself to need more disk space than lintian (assuming
that the debian/rules clean target is run before lintian is).  Lintian
appeared to be slowly failing on each binary package in turn, so I just
hit Ctrl-C on it.

I asked on #debian-devel in case this was a known problem, and lamby
pointed out this ticket and suggested adding a note in case this is the
same underlying issue, so I'm doing so.  I didn't attempt to investigate
further yet.

Cheers,
    Olly