8971 - Thread spawned by XPInstall causes crash on startup

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Core Graveyard :: Installer: XPInstall Engine, defect, P1)

Description

[Samir Gehani]

Currently, XPInstall spawns a thread at startup to perform scheduled tasks
including file deletions/replacements from previously conducted installs. This
causes a crash because
"...of a race condition in the dynamic loader. Two threads are
trying to relocate code at the same time and this royally hoses stuff. Thread #1
is running the component manager. Evil Thread #2 comes from normal static
linkage from xpinstall." [waterson, bug #8849]

As a result XPInstall has been turned of on Unix again.

Comment 1

[Samir Gehani]

Fix checked in yesterday afternoon; today's build should reflect this. XPInstall
has been re-enabled on the Unices.

Comment 2

[Samir Gehani]

Proposed verification per QA request:
Repeated launching of apprunner on multiple machines with RedHat 5.2 (stock
install is Linux kernel 2.0.36 and old glibc). This bug was due to a race
condition at component load-time (apprunner start-time) and thus is hard to
verify.

Comment 3

[Jimmy Lee]

Build 7/9/99

No known problems.  New bug report will be prepared if new or similar symptoms
arise.

Comment 4

[leger]

Bulk move of XPInstall (component to be deleted) bugs to Installer: XPInstall
Engine