Re: 2.5 'what to expect'

[Jeff Garzik]

Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Dave Jones wrote:
> 
>>- Some people seem to have trouble running rpm, most notably Red Hat 9 users.
>>  This is a known bug of rpm.
>>  Workaround: run "export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5", before running rpm.
> 
> 
> Ah, _thank you_.
> 
> It's not an rpm bug, as such; it's a problem/bug with DB4, the
> Berkeley DB library.
> 
> I just spent 2 hours trying to figure out why rpm was failing.
> write() returning EINVAL for no reason?  Finally spotted that O_DIRECT
> was the significant bit.

You got it.  db4+O_DIRECT == blah.  (I just had a conversation yesterday 
with rpm's maintainer about what the problems are)

One problem is O_DIRECT should return an error on open(2) or fcntl(2), 
not write(2).

Another problem appears to be that db does not know about the alignment 
requirements of O_DIRECT.

> End result: I copied an rpm database from another machine.  It's wrong
> for this machine, but nearly right.  Ah well.
> 
> If I'd only known about the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL fix sooner.

Unfortunately, LD_ASSUME_KERNEL is a lucky hack, not a fix.  rpm dlopens 
a pam .so.  LD_ASSUME_KERNEL doesn't work for that .so, only for rpm 
itself...  fun ensues.

	Jeff