recent linux kernels broken?

[Marc Slemko <ma...@znep.com>]

I seem to see a lot of people submitting bug reports over the past few
weeks, using a fairly recent 2.2 kernel, about Apache just hanging after
some time on their systems.

Any known kernel bugs that could be causing this?  It seems odd that this
pops up all of a sudden, all with very similar linux kernel versions...

Re: recent linux kernels broken?

[Tom Harrington <tp...@crosstor.com>]

Marc Slemko wrote:
> 
> I seem to see a lot of people submitting bug reports over the past few
> weeks, using a fairly recent 2.2 kernel, about Apache just hanging after
> some time on their systems.
> 
> Any known kernel bugs that could be causing this?  It seems odd that this
> pops up all of a sudden, all with very similar linux kernel versions...

I don't know where known kernel bugs would be tracked online.  But I have
noticed one case of apparently-buggy networking behavior with 2.2.x
kernels.  The test case I saw was a pair of programs that implemented
UDP send/receive, the sort of thing used in an introductory network
programming class.  In _some_ cases, a call to "recvfrom", with no
incoming data would not block, but would instead return an error.  I
don't recall the error code right now, but it was unexpected behavior
that didn't match documentation.

This happened on 2.2.6 on a PowerPC system and 2.2.12-20smp on some
recent x86-series clone.  It did not happen on 2.0.36 on Pentium, or
(as a sanity check) on any version of Solaris I could get hold of.

Apache shouldn't encounter this specific bug, but it's possible that
what I saw was a manifestation of a deeper problem that would affect
Apache.

-- 
Tom Harrington
CrosStor Software, Inc.
tph@crosstor.com