Description of problem: rpm hangs in futex $ strace rpm -i something.rpm ...snip... open("/var/lib/rpm/__db.002", O_RDWR|O_LARGEFILE) = 4 fcntl64(4, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 1318912, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED, 4, 0) = 0xb7b91000 close(4) = 0 stat64("/var/lib/rpm/__db.003", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=450560, ...}) = 0 open("/var/lib/rpm/__db.003", O_RDWR|O_LARGEFILE) = 4 fcntl64(4, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 450560, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED, 4, 0) = 0xb7b23000 close(4) = 0 stat64("/var/lib/rpm/Packages", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=54423552, ...}) = 0 open("/var/lib/rpm/Packages", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 4 fcntl64(4, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 read(4, "\0\0\0\0\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0a\25\6\0\10\0\0\0\0\20\0\0\0\10\0\0b&\0\0"..., 512) = 512 close(4) = 0 open("/var/lib/rpm/Packages", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 4 fcntl64(4, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 fstat64(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=54423552, ...}) = 0 futex(0xb7b6e70c, FUTEX_WAIT, 1, NULL <unfinished ...> <hung> Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): $ rpm -q -a | egrep -E -e '(kernel|glibc|rpm)' glibc-common-2.8-8.i386 rpm-devel-4.4.2.3-2.fc9.i386 kernel-devel-2.6.27.5-41.fc9.i686 kernel-headers-2.6.27.7-53.fc9.i386 rpm-libs-4.4.2.3-2.fc9.i386 rpm-4.4.2.3-2.fc9.i386 kernel-2.6.26.6-79.fc9.i686 kernel-firmware-2.6.27.7-53.fc9.noarch glibc-headers-2.8-8.i386 kernel-2.6.27.5-41.fc9.i686 kernel-devel-2.6.26.6-79.fc9.i686 kernel-2.6.27.7-53.fc9.i686 rpm-build-4.4.2.3-2.fc9.i386 redhat-rpm-config-9.0.2-1.fc9.noarch kerneloops-0.12-1.fc9.i386 rpm-python-4.4.2.3-2.fc9.i386 kernel-devel-2.6.27.7-53.fc9.i686 glibc-2.8-8.i686 glibc-devel-2.8-8.i386 $ cat /etc/fedora-release Fedora release 9 (Sulphur) How reproducible: It's unclear how to reproduce this behavior; it is clear how to remediate. It hasn't begun to occur interactively in my sight. I have only remediated The system has been doing automatic updates off of PackageKit for many months now. Today I returned to this machine after a month or so and found multiple weeks worth of rpmq weekly cron jobs piled up. Thus the symptom clearly started spontaneously many weeks ago (which isn't helpful for us here). The computer is a Fujitsu tablet operated by a 10-year old who runs Firefox, gimp and gnucash (very gently); and doesn't run yum or rpm. Remediation: $ su # cd /var/lib/rpm # ls Basenames __db.000 __db.002 Dirnames Group Name Providename Pubkeys Requireversion Sigmd5 Conflictname __db.001 __db.003 Filemd5s Installtid Packages Provideversion Requirename Sha1header Triggername # rm -f __db.??? # ps -ef | grep rpm root 8906 8750 0 10:28 pts/2 00:00:00 strace rpm -i something.noarch.rpm root 8907 8706 0 10:28 pts/2 00:00:00 rpm -i something.noarch.rpm # kill -9 8907 # exit $ rpm -i some-package.noarch.rpm <success!> Additional info: Bugzilla 112811 was closed 2007-11 for inattention. This seems to be exactly that same problem but now occurring on Fedora 9.
All it takes is a single rpm (or rpm-using, such as yum / PackageKit) process to crash or get forcefully terminated for this to happen. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 444321 ***