Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel
engineering.skroutz.gr
Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel
1–10 of 44 posts
Re: Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel
#2Great find, and it sounds like a great place to work.
Re: Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel
#3Impressive detective work and documentation.
Re: Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel
#4I have, admittedly old and very vague, memories of people talking about rsync being "hard on networks" or "dealing poorly with congestion." I'd put good odds that this bug is why those statements existed.
Re: Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel
#5Great writeup, and also thoroughly answers the first question that popped into my mind: "how on earth could a bug in the Linux network stack that causes the whole data transfer to get stuck stay undiscovered for so long?"
Re: Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel
#6wow. We've run into rsync bugs like this and just chalked it up to "things happen"
Re: Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel
#7Great find, and it sounds like a great place to work.
Just learned that Skroutz is pronounced 'Scrooge' in Greek, and this isn't a coincidence!
Re: Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel
#8> she
Can we just stop pretending.
Re: Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel
#9I have, admittedly old and very vague, memories of people talking about rsync being "hard on networks" or "dealing poorly with congestion." I'd put good odds that this bug is why those statements existed.
The bug requires transferring over 2GB of data without reading from the socket, so it's unlikely; also, a hang is the opposite of being hard on the network. ;) However the uncommon characteristics of rsync traffic is probably why some congestion control algorithms may not deal well with rsync.
Re: Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel
#10Impressive detective work and documentation.
It's like watching a murder mystery unfold. It feels really daunting to dive this deep into a bug on its vague symptoms. It's probably the selection bias for what gets on the HN front page, but it feels like a large minority here can tackle something like this. I have trouble imaging having that much of a handle on Linux to feel comfortable hot patching the kernel because I suspect something is wrong in the networking stack.