followup: stuck lmtpd processes

[Etienne Goyer]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2003 at 11:13:06AM -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> It is not a general solution when you hit glibc/kernel bugs, but I can
> certainly live with it IF I manage to track down a version of glibc and
> kernel that won't deadlock, that we can recommend. Either that, or allow for
> runtime-switchable behaviours (I am willing to code this).

This is not good enough.  You can't recommend a specific kernel/glibc
version; this is dictated by the distribution people use.  You can't
just recommend using the latest either, because a lot (most ?) people
will prefer to use older, well-known, stable (Debian stable, RedHat 7.3)
distribution.

The obvious solution is to not use alarm() to interrupt blocking
syscall, but to use non-blocking call with select() instead.  I
am not a very proficient C Unix programmer, so maybe this suggestion
make no sense.  However, in the case of the bug with fud I discussed in
another post, it was a perfectly workable solution.

And please don't scoff it as "a problem with Linux, not Cyrus".  Linux
may well be broken (I can't tell), but it still constitute the vast
majority of Cyrus installation (I would believe), and thus merit to be
accomodated.

-- 
Etienne Goyer                    Linux Québec Technologies Inc.
http://www.LinuxQuebec.com       etienne.goyer at linuxquebec.com