[vbox-dev] Bug in VBoxXPCOM.so: SIGCHLD handler not overridden properly

[Florian Vichot]

BTW the 3 lines patch in the previous email is under MIT license.

Thanks,
Florian

Florian Vichot a écrit :
> Hello,
> 
> I've been using the virtualbox libvirt driver in my app lately, and I've
> noticed a very annoying behaviour: as soon as I initialize the vbox
> driver in libvirt, it loads dynamically a bunch of libraries, amongst
> which VBoxXPCOM.so. This library spawns a VBoxXPCOMIPCD if none already
> exists, and overrides the SIGCLHD handler when it does so, probably to
> catch the potential crash of the VBoxXPCOMIPCD daemon.
> 
> Where it gets ugly is when it overwrites the handler without saving the
> previous handler, and so whatever was there before in not executed
> anymore. My app uses the Qt4 framework, and I make heavy usage of
> QProcess (which is a wrapper around a process) and its waitForFinished()
> method. To work that method needs to have a handler installed for
> SIGCHLD, and Qt4 does so at the app initialisation.
> 
> But as the vbox driver loads its libraries dynamically, those are always
> loaded after Qt installed its handler, and thus even though the Qt
> handler is well behaved (it saves the previous handler, and executes it
> once it's done with it's own code), the VBoxXPCOM.so isn't, and so, my
> app freezes every time I make a call to waitForFinished once the vbox
> libvirt driver is loaded.
> 
> Actually the fact that's in libvirt is irrelevant, any app using the
> XPCOM API will encounter the same problem.
> 
> I've attached a patch that should solve the problem.
> 
> I didn't test it, as whatever version of VirtualBox OSE I got (3.04,
> 3.0.6, SVN HEAD), they would either not compile (SVN HEAD) or not work
> (in 3.04 and 3.06 OSE, I get this error: "###!!! ASSERTION:
> ExceptionStub not thread-safe: '_mOwningThread.GetThread() ==
> PR_GetCurrentThread()'"), even without the patch.
> 
> As the code I'm patching is the XPCOM library from Mozilla, do I need to
> file a bug report with them ? If so, could you point me to the proper
> bugtracker, I couldn't find it.
> 
> Thank you,
> Florian
> 
> 
> 
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