Re: Crash in fork.c on everything = install hosed

[Malcolm Box <malcolm@brownale.demon.co.uk>]

Gary Hennigan wrote:

> "Malcolm Box" <malcolm@brownale.demon.co.uk> writes:
>  
>
> > OK, that looks like it might fix things.  But can anyone tell me how
> > to get the new version onto my machine given that both dpkg & apt-get
> > don't work at the moment?  Is there some way to manually unpack the
> > files from the .deb into the right places?
> >    
> I've never done it, but there's nothing magical about *.deb
> files. They're simple "ar" archive files, usually containing a
> data.tar.gz and control.tar.gz file, among other things. For your
> purposes you could try and untar the data.tar.gz file, which would
> contain the actually libc binaries and go from there.
>  
Thanks for the hint.  Unfortunately, the machine is still losing, even 
after installing libc6_2.3.2.ds1-9_i386.deb which is the latest.  Just 
to check I've done the right, thing, I did:

ar x libc6_2.3.2.ds1-9_i386.deb
gunzip data.tar.gz
cd /
tar xvf data.tar

all as root.  Then ran ldconfig, since this seems to be all that the 
postinstall scripts do.

But the problem still remains - programs (including all shell scripts 
:-( ) that attempt to fork result in a:
../nptl/sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/fork.c:132: __libc_fork: Assertion `({ 
__typeof (self->tid) __value; if (sizeof (__value) == 1) asm volatile 
("movb %%gs:%P2,%b0" : "=q" (__value) : "0" (0), "i" (((size_t) 
&((struct pthread *)0)->tid))); else if (sizeof (__value) == 4) asm 
volatile ("movl %%gs:%P1,%0" : "=r" (__value) : "i" (((size_t) &((struct 
pthread *)0)->tid))); else { if (sizeof (__value) != 8) abort (); asm 
volatile ("movl %%gs:%P1,%%eax\n\t" "movl %%gs:%P2,%%edx" : "=A" 
(__value) : "i" (((size_t) &((struct pthread *)0)->tid)), "i" (((size_t) 
&((struct pthread *)0)->tid) + 4)); } __value; }) != ppid' failed.

And I'm still stuck :-(

Can anyone suggest what other parts of the system I should manually 
"upgrade" to fix this?  Kernel?  Binutils?  Trouble is of couse that a 
whole lot of stuff relies on the ability to fork.

Or is there another way to do this - boot from a rescue disk (what 
rescue disk!) and then point apt at the installed system and get it to 
fix it?

Cheers,

Malcolm