Re: FIFO race condition on SunOS kernels

[Martijn Dekker]

Op 01-01-19 om 23:47 schreef Vladimir Marek:
[...]
> That said, I do use VirtualBox 5.1.22r115126 which is pretty old.

I recently upgraded to VirtualBox 6.0 on Mac OS X 10.11 and the results 
are identical.

> Putting 0.5s delay anywhere in the loop makes the problem disappear.

Yes, I'd noticed as much. I am trying to get my portable shell library, 
modernish, to work on as many operating systems as possible. One of its 
recently added features involves creating and opening FIFOs on the fly, 
which breaks on Solaris on VirtualBox. My own experimentation told me 
that I need a full second to be safe.

> Hmm, so we are waiting on a condition. That needs to be investigated
> deeper. It would be great if you could open a case for this as we have
> to prioritize our work ...

How would I go about it? I'm not an Oracle customer, nor could I justify 
the expense to become one. I use my test Solaris VMs only to test 
modernish, as the free-of-charge licence permits. I've previously been 
given to understand that only customers can report Solaris bugs. But I'd 
like to give some bug reports back if you give me a way to do it.

> At the moment it looks like a bug in Solaris to me, but it shows only on
> VirtualBox.

Thanks, that's good to have confirmed! It was hoping as much -- it would 
have been hard to believe that something this basic is broken on Solaris 
in general.

By the way, a side effect of developing modernish has been to put me on 
a crusade of sorts against shell bugs on all the shells, as I keep 
running into them. The "standards compliant" /usr/xpg4/bin/sh (ksh88) on 
Solaris has a LOT of bugs, including some really serious ones that I 
wrote about on the Austin Group list last year. Where/how could I reach 
a person who is interested in receiving bug reports?

Thanks,

- M.