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Date:      Tue, 03 Jul 2007 10:49:30 +0200
From:      Ivan Voras <ivoras@fer.hr>
To:        freebsd-current@freebsd.org
Subject:   LiveCD trouble
Message-ID:  <f6d2j1$epc$1@sea.gmane.org>

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Hi

One step in my SoC project is to create a LiveCD environment with X11=20
and a simple GUI desktop. I chose Xfce because it's small and easy to=20
maintain. Creating a FreeBSD LiveCD was fairly straightforward thanks to =

good design of the base system, but I have strange problems with X11=20
applications. The symptoms are:

- xfdesktop crashes in glib's wrapper of pthred_cond_timedwait() with=20
"Invalid argument" error
- Firefox runs with 100% CPU spent in SYS time, with "top" reporting it=20
in a libthr-related state

It's unusual that both problems seem to be connected with threading,=20
using libmap to remap libthr to libpthread doesn't help, and some other=20
threaded applications I tried (csup) work fine.

This is a showstopper kind of bug but I don't know where to start=20
debugging. I've run strace but I the only unusual thing I saw was many=20
EAGAIN errors on pipes and unix sockets. Since I'm using unionfs=20
extensively I tried without it (in case it has problems with pipes and=20
sockets) but using UFS over md devices doesn't help with the above two=20
problems.

The weirdest part is that the binaries on LiveCD are copied from my=20
*working* desktop system (by first creating binary packages then=20
installing them in the new location), where they have no such problems.=20
The only thing different seems to be that the LiveCD binaries are run=20
from cd9660 read-only file system instead of UFS. :(

There's one more unusual problem: the message newsyslog gives when=20
booting, about invalid "at" line in newsyslog.conf, but this config file =

is completely valid, generated from "make distribution" when the image=20
is built. Could it be that cd9660 is corrupting data, or doesn't support =

essential features (maybe mmap()?)?

An ISO image of this work-in-progress can be downloaded here:=20
http://ivoras.net/stuff/freebsd-live-image.iso.bz2 [200 MB]. This is a=20
temporary location and the image will be removed in the future. When=20
running it, ignore all the messages about the installer, login as root=20
and run startx. To see how file systems are mounted, look at=20
/etc/rc.d/livecd script.

I'd appreciate if anyone can look at this or at least provide pointers=20
on what to try next.


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