[Python-bugs-list] [ python-Bugs-472642 ] interpreter crash when import .so fails w/ Purify (original) (raw)

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Fri, 19 Oct 2001 06:49:52 -0700

Bugs item #472642, was opened at 2001-10-18 20:42 You can respond by visiting: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=105470&aid=472642&group_id=5470

Category: Python Interpreter Core Group: Python 2.2 Status: Open Resolution: None Priority: 5 Submitted By: Neal Norwitz (nnorwitz) Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)

Summary: interpreter crash when import .so fails w/ Purify

Initial Comment: The python interpreter crashes when import _socket fails (.so). This only happens when running purify (on solaris 2.8). The problem is that dlerror() returns NULL, which is then passed to strlen().

Attached is a file with the stack trace which caused the problem, and a patch to fix the problem.

Neal

Comment By: Guido van Rossum (gvanrossum) Date: 2001-10-19 06:49

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Note that Neal mentions Purify as a condition. I've added that to the subject. Could Purify somehow be screwing dlerror()? Not much we can do about that...

On the one hand it seems wrong that PyErr_SetString() should be patched; on the other hand there's nothing wrong with making that function a bit more robust. I give the patch a +0.

Comment By: Martin v. L�wis (loewis) Date: 2001-10-18 23:33

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I find it surprising that dlerror returns NULL. According to dlerror(3DL), it will only return NULL if there was no error since the last call to dlerror. Since handle is NULL, there certainly was an error very recently (in the dlopen), and I cannot see any dlerror call in-between.

In any case, your patch seems to be wrong: the bug is that dlerror returns NULL when it shouldn't. If we really need to work around this bug (which I'm not convinced that we should), then the work-around is to pass a non-null constant string to PyErr_SetString if dlerror returned null.

You can respond by visiting: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=105470&aid=472642&group_id=5470