[mythtv-users] mythbackend crashes every 6-7 hours

[Brian J. Murrell]

On Wed, 2010-11-03 at 21:05 +0100, Rob Verduijn wrote:
> Hi,

Hi,

> Mythbackend is still running with a modest amount of memory usage.
> It was indeed the circular symbolic link in the storage directory. 

I find this interesting given that the kernel has protections against
dereferencing circular symbolic links endlessly.  There is even an errno
for it (ELOOP).

I find it difficult to imagine that the kernel following circular
symbolic links, with it's "too many links" protection built-in was
causing so much memory use, so I have to assume that libqt or myth was
in fact doing the symbolic link deferencing.  Was that the case?

If so, is/was it doing this dereferencing without protections for
detecting loops?  To be sure, the input data was wrong, but well written
software should deal with bad input data when it can determine it's bad
and detecting symbolic link loops can be detected, as the kernel proves.

In that light, if my assumptions are correct, I'd call this one a bug.

b.

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