Re: Serious bug in recent Linux kernels

John Kennedy (jk@csuchico.edu)
Sat, 9 Jan 1999 06:13:28 -0800 (PST)

[Kars de Jong]
> There is a serious bug in recent kernels with the timeout of the
> poll() system call. The calculation to turn the timeout value
> from milliseconds into whatever schedule_timeout() expects is
> wrong. The following happened when I read my mail with mutt. I use a
> development glibc (2.1.106) which uses poll() when it is available
> in the kernel. As soon as I opened read a mail message my screen
> got spammed with hundreds of lines saying:
> schedule_timeout: wrong timeout value f3333335 from 00024c0e

Hmm. Back on ~12/30, I noticed that mutt would crank my CPU load up
(busy loop?) when I was in its paging mode (reading the email body or
while reading the help info).

I cannot say that I've seen any schedule_timeout messages show up
because of it.

I figured it was a busy-loop in pager.c's mutt_pager(), but I haven't
really had a chance to look at it. That was in 0.95i and now 0.95.1i.

At the time, I compiled mutt on a few of my systems had the same problem
on all 3 of them. My oldest was linux-2.1.127 & glibc-2.0.100, with
the original 12/30/98 tests being run on 2.2.0-pre1 & glibc-2.0.109.

--- john

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