Strange SUN behaviour.

[Mr P Johnson "Baddow"]

We have a strange bug here when running certain programs, some of
which use a lightweight process package we have written.  This package plays
tricks with the stack and also does some signal management for non-blocking
I/O.  It has been used before without problems, but some changes have
recently been made to the i/o buffering routines.

When one of these programs is killed by a signal (even kill -9), the shell
it is running in dies as well.  Under rsh a stream of "Use 'logout' to log
out" messages is printed before the shell dies.  Debuggers also die.  The
behaviour seems to be consistent with a stream of ^D characters being sent
to the terminal (nested shells all die, so it is not just the parent shell).

On one occasion, an attempt was made to start up a shelltool after a
previous one had died and the new shelltool died as well, as did subsequent
shelltools.  Creating two shelltools in quick succession got round this: it
seemed that ^Ds were being sent to /dev/ttyp4, killing any shell which took
that as standard input.  Two minutes later the computer crashed.

This problem has been observed on a Sun 3/160 and a Sun3/260 running SunOS
4.0.3_EXPORT and a Sun 3/60 running 4.0_Export.  The programs in question
were compiled on the Sun 3/60 by the Oregon C++ compiler and by the
Glockenspiel/Oasys "Designer" C++ (a cfront variant).  All combinations show
the same symptoms.  The same problem occurs with terminal login over the
serial ports.

Does anyone know what is going wrong here?  Is this a known bug?  Is there a
work-around?

Any info or suggestions gratefully received.

Thank-you for your time.

-- 
Paul Johnson,         | `The moving finger writes, And having writ, moves on,'
GEC-Marconi Research  |                    Omar Kyham when contemplating `vi'.
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