[Crash-utility] crash sometimes doesn't terminate, loops forever looking for a process that doesn't exist

[Adrien Kunysz]

On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 2:24 PM, Dave Anderson <anderson at redhat.com> wrote:
> I would be a little hesitant to get rid of the pc->pipe_pid at this point
> in time.
>
> I can't seem to be able to reproduce it, but certainly there should
> be an escape valve in output_commands_to_pid() to recognize it and bail
> out.  But I presume that your piped command sequence actually worked,
> and so it would be strange/unnecessary for setup_redirect() to do the
> error(FATAL_RESTART, ...) that it currently does when output_commands_to_pid()
> returns with a NULL?

I am not sure either what happened exactly but as far as I can tell
the piped command didn't really work since it terminated before
reading anything from its stdin. I am not sure how to reproduce the
problem and it may very well be symptomatic of a problem in our
environment but I know it happened at least twice (cores available on
demand). So I think error(FATAL_RESTART) is actually appropriate (or
at least more appropriate than looping forever). Or do you think it's
important to get the return value of the child before deciding what to
do?

> Anyway, my point is to try to keep the fix as simple as possible...

Makes sense.