glibc causing crashes in most anything that does DNS lookups in F16

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2011-08-08 at 15:24 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> Hey, folks.
> 
> So lately Firefox has been crashing a ton for me on F16 (and Evolution's
> been disappearing silently too - bet it's the same cause). Today I fired
> it up from a console and found out what the error was:
> 
> "__libc_res_nquery: Assertion `hp != hp2' failed."
> 
> then I tried to use Epiphany for a bit and found it was crashing on
> exactly the same error!
> 
> A bit of detective work led to:
> 
> https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/24615
> 
> apparently Arch has been seeing the same thing. They've addressed it by
> reverting the following upstream glibc commit:
> 
> http://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=commit;h=4769ae77fc6c8dacea6476addb015c8797848cdd
> 
> I've just built an F16 glibc with that reversion to test locally,
> haven't installed it yet. Just wanted to flag this up and see if anyone
> else has seen the same thing, and whether we should just revert the
> change in Fedora, fix it, deal with upstream or what...
> 
> I suspect it may be a _bit_ more complicated than 'any failed DNS query
> invariably causes app to crash in all situations', as I'd have expected
> a bit more of an outcry. But I'm certainly getting a ton of crashes
> here. It may depend a little on exact DNS server configuration or
> something.

So Shawn Starr mentioned on IRC that his Firefox was crashing a ton in
F16, and sure enough, when I asked him to run from a console, turned out
he was hitting this.

He found an upstream report with a patch:

http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=13013

it'd be great if we could get that into Fedora glibc. Thanks!
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net