Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 89662
rpm always fails under recent 2.5 kernels
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:53:18 EDT
Description of problem: I'm running vanilla Red Hat 9, with the 2.5.68-mm2 kernel. All rpm commands run under this kernel fail with the following error: ~ # time rpm -q autofs rpmdb: unable to join the environment error: db4 error(11) from dbenv->open: Resource temporarily unavailable error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - Resource temporarily unavailable (11) error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm package autofs is not installed real 0m18.035s user 0m0.010s sys 0m0.006s As you can see, it takes a while for RPM to give up, but it does indeed give up. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): rpm-4.2-0.69 How reproducible: Every time. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install RH9. 2. Build and install a recent 2.5 kernel. 3. Run any rpm command, such as "rpm -q rpm". Actual results: See the error message above. Expected results: It should "just work". Additional info: I already knew about this problem, but there's no bugzilla bug tracking it. The workaround is to set the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL environment variable to 2.2.5 before running rpm.
I suspect that this is the new-fangled (and incompatible!) semantics for O_DIRECT. Try rpm-4.2-1 packages at ftp://ftp.rpm.org/pub/rpm/test-4.2 Does that work with kernel-2.5? If so, then it's O_DIRECT.
The new package doesn't help. The error is the same as under the RH9 rpm.
Hmmm, can you attach strace output here? strace -f -o /tmp/xxx rpm -qavv
Created attachment 91399 [details] Output from "strace -f -o /tmp/xxx rpm -qavv"
Created attachment 91400 [details] strace output from "strace -f -o /tmp/xxx rpm -qavv"
In case it wasn't clear, both attachments are from the rpm-4.2-1 package that Jeff referred to, not the regular Red Hat RPM package. The specific kernel I'm running is 2.5.68-mm2. For glibc, it's glibc-2.3.2-27.9, and for db4, it's db4-4.0.14-20.
Odd. I don't see any attempt to open __db.001. 23174 stat64("/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0 23174 stat64("/var/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0 23174 stat64("/var/lib/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0 23174 stat64("/var/lib/rpm", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0 23174 access("/var/lib/rpm", W_OK) = 0 23174 access("/var/lib/rpm/__db.001", F_OK) = 0 23174 access("/var/lib/rpm/Packages", F_OK) = 0 23174 open("/usr/share/locale/locale.alias", O_RDONLY) = 3 23174 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2601, ...}) = 0 ... error message here ... What happens if you do rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*
Is that a safe operation? This is my work desktop machine, and I don't want to destroy anything important.
Removing /var/lib/rpm/__db* safe? Yes, safe on quiescent machine. The files contain lock names, and supply a lookaside readonly cache. If you're worried, save a copy of /var/lib/rpm/Packages right now. As long as you have that, I can fix anything.
The __db.001 file was empty. With it gone, rpm -qa works fine for me.