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

[Dave Anderson]

----- Original Message -----
> 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?

Ah OK, if the piped command actually failed, then it certainly should go
through the error(FATAL_RESTART) path.

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