Re: New kernel - netscape hangs

H.J. Lu (hjl@varesearch.com)
Wed, 3 Feb 1999 11:39:38 -0800 (PST)

>
> > A lockd bug in Linux 2.2.1 causes netscape to hang when hitting the
> > "new msg" button. It took me a while to figure out what was going
> > on. I have sent a patch to Linus. I hope it will be fixed in the
> > official kernel soon. I am enclosing the patch here.
>
> This is wrong. *Do not apply this patch*. If you rely on file locking
> and your lock daemon happens to be unreachable your machine will
> continue away without realising if you use this patch. A week layer when
>

With my patch, fcntl will return -1 and set errno to EINVAL. It is up
to the mail proram to detect this condition and proceed accordingly.
BTW, it is requred by POSIX to return EINVAL if file locking is not
available for the file desrcriptor.

> you notice your mail spool will be full of corrupt mailboxes and your
> user base will hate you while your manager demands you change OS.

If it happens, it is caused by the broken mail proram.

> Use the "nolock" mount option. That tells Linux you know there is no
> file locking, you don't care there is no file locking, you aren't using
> remote file locking.
>

It is irrelevant to my patch. My patch fixes a POSIX bug.

-- 
H.J. Lu (hjl@gnu.org)


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