FreeBSD thread issues

[Charles Sprickman]

Hello all,

I was looking at the notes about Nagios 2.x and saw mention of the 
problems some people were having with threads and FreeBSD.  I'm no 
programmer, but I figured the folks on the -hackers list are pretty 
friendly to questions like that, so I asked over there.

The thread I started is here:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=111930118000001&r=1&w=2

There are some very interesting replies, a few in particular note that 
Nagios may be breaking POSIX spec in how it spawns/destroys threads:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=freebsd-hackers&m=111944526323754&w=2
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=freebsd-hackers&m=111945035012258&w=2

Anyhow, I'm sure if Ethan were to post some more specific info to 
freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org (it's an open list, no need to sub), this 
issue could get banged out pretty quickly.

Shortly after this thread, I found another where the issue was brought up 
by another curious poster, and he was using 5.4, which uses a newer 
threading library:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=112119712600002&r=1&w=2

This post again brings up the "fork without exec or exit" possibly not 
following spec:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=freebsd-hackers&m=112125883804481&w=2

"I don't know what Nagios does just after fork(2), it would be worth to
check.  It appears that fork(2)ing without exec(2)ing or _exit(2)ing
in a pthreaded program is not a "valid" behaviour, regarding to
SUSv3 [1].  I don't want to avoid admitting there is a problem in
FreeBSD threading library, I don't know how other OSes handle this,
but Nagios folks should really avoid doing what is explicitely
dissuaded in SUSv3."

Is there anything Ethan or anyone else needs from the FreeBSD community to 
work this out?  Anything I can do?

Thanks,

Charles

[1] 
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/pthread_atfork.html
     (look at the "RATIONALE" section)

___
Charles Sprickman
NetEng/SysAdmin
Bway.net - New York's Best Internet - www.bway.net
spork at bway.net - 212.655.9344



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