Nagios segfault on startup when embedded perl is enabled on 7.1-stable/i386

[Wesley Shields]

On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 11:16:42AM +0930, Jarrod Sayers wrote:
> On 25/04/2009, at 5:23 AM, Wesley Shields wrote:
> > There is a PR about this issue (ports/131993) but the maintainer is
> > reluctant to approve the patch listed there. The maintainer has asked
> > for system information from people who report this problem in the past
> > (see the PR log for details) but nothing has ever come of it. It may  
> > be
> > useful for you to send the same information to the maintainer who is,
> > presumably, still interested in fixing this bug.
> 
> Just to clarify things, yes, I do recognise there is an issue here and  
> yes, I am still working to find a resolution.  My reluctance in  
> approving the patch in ports/131993 simply boils down to the fact I am  
> unable to even reproduce the issue, and believe me, I have tried on  
> many, many systems.
> 
> The issue seems to be the passing of the embedding variable to  
> Perl_sys_init3 (aka PERL_SYS_INIT3).  The second argument to this  
> function takes a char *** which init_embedded_perl() attempts to pass  
> to it as a pointer to a char **, err...  This does generate a warning  
> during compilation but as to why the embedded Perl functionality still  
> works on my systems without faulting is beyond me.
> 
> Sebastian's patch will resolve the problem, and with some  
> modifications and additional checks and warnings, I have a patch which  
> now needs some testing. Grab it from the URL below, dumping it in /usr/ 
> ports/net-mgmt/nagios/files.
> 
> http://www.netleader.com.au/~jarrod/FreeBSD/patch-base-utils.c
> 
> I've tested it as much as I can and don't believe it introduces a  
> regression on non-faulting systems so if it solves the issue for users  
> with faulting nagios binaries, then I will bundle it up and have it  
> committed.

As I've said in the past, thank you for being so responsive with these
ports.  I will continue to monitor that PR and if the users who were
having the problems can confirm the above patch fixes it then I will
work with you to get it into the tree.

> > Is the benefit to the embedded perl option worth the occasional bug
> > report? Is it possible to remove this option from the port?
> 
> I believe so, systems with many Perl based probes do benefit from  
> starting just one instance of the interpreter.

Fair enough.  Thanks again for your continued work on these ports.

-- WXS