From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.1; Linux) Description of problem: I'm not sure what happened, but on two occasions rhn-applet would freeze. Initially the icon in the systray would look corrupted, and later it would disappear entirely. The process however did not crash. Later I discovered that it is keeping a perpetual lock on the rpm database, and strace reveals that it is stuck at the NPTL futex, very similar to the rpm lockup problems. [root@laptop root]# fuser /var/lib/rpm/Packages /var/lib/rpm/Packages: 3594 [root@laptop root]# ps -ef |grep 3594 |grep -v grep warren 3594 1 0 Apr12 ? 00:00:07 /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/rhn-applet-gui --sm-client-id default5 [root@laptop root]# strace -p 3594 futex(0x42132320, FUTEX_WAIT, -2, NULL Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): rhn-applet-2.0.9-0.9.0.1 kernel-2.4.20-9 glibc-2.3.2-27.9
Sounds like a problem associated to the rpm library or its bindings, rhn-applet just uses the Python bindings for librpm. Daniel
FWIW I've seen hangs in programs on FUTEX_WAIT which have nothing to do with RPM. Totem comes to mind specifically. I've also just discovered today that the ximian installer runs through it's rpm verification much faster with LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.5. On my main machine I switched to virgin kernels to avoid the problem long ago.
I'm guessing this is fixed by recent rpm-4.2.1.