[darcs-users] [darcs-devel] buildbot failure in darcs on karel opensolaris OpenSolaris-2008.05 nevada-86-rc3 i386

[zooko]

On May 21, 2008, at 3:27 PM, Karel Gardas wrote:

> it's interesting how you spot the issue even w/o seeing the real  
> machine
> here. Well, you are right.

;-)

> Anyway, if you like to test anything on this broken "box", just let me
> know and I'll test it for you

Thank you!  I do care about the issue of programs depending on a  
monotonically increasing gettimeofday when they do not need to.  In  
my opinion it is one of those "insidious" issues that causes a  
problem so rarely that most people think it is okay.

Looking around, I see that libcurl very recently started detecting  
and using CLOCK_MONOTONIC:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.curl.cvs/9220

If you want to test darcs with a very recent libcurl, then I would be  
happy to gain confidence that darcs (and other libcurl-using  
programs) are not going to mysteriously hang if they hit the rare  
case that gettimeofday is not monotonically increasing.


Hm.  Except I just realized that I do not understand what happened on  
your system:

> Interesting, so I used Solaris's pstack tool to print the stack of the
> running process.

What a cool tool.  I wish linux had that.

> It was quite strange to see all the threads ending on
> something which should block and wait and see. So I executed pstack
> several times and then seen that one thread is executing some call  
> from
> curl and that the threads' top stack item is gettimeofday call.

Does this mean that libcurl is in a fast polling loop, calling  
gettimeofday() over and over and using up CPU?

Or that it is blocked in a system call that has not returned?

Thanks!

Regards,

Zooko