[Xgridagent-development] FreeBSD & sem_open Bad System Call

[Travis B. <tr...@be...>]

Thanks to Daniel for putting 1.0.3 online, and for the continued work 
on the "large files" problem. Daniel, do you think the problem is due 
to some sort of race condition in/with Roadrunner? I'm trying to get a 
better handle on what's going on.

I finally got XGridAgent working on my FreeBSD 5.2.1 systems. It turned 
out to be something simple--the calls to sem_open() in xgridagent.c 
(lines 93 and 925 in the latest version on CVS) were the cause of the 
"bad system call". Commenting those lines out to force it to use 
sem_init() fixes the problem.

 From what I've read, POSIX semaphore support in FreeBSD is new as of 
5.0, and is somewhat buggy. I'm not sure why I'm encountering this 
problem but Matthew isn't (differences in how we compiled our 
kernels?), but I suspect it may be something we have to write a 
work-around for. Here's a discussion of the sem_open / bad system call 
problem:

http://www.atm.tut.fi/list-archive/freebsd-stable/msg10083.html

What approach should we take to dealing with this problem? It seems 
like it would be fairly simple to test for it at "configure" time, then 
fix it with appropriate preprocessor macros that force the use of 
sem_init instead of sem_open. Unfortunately, I know next to nothing 
about the autoconf / automake system. If someone knows of a good 
starting point for this, I would appreciate it (of course, I would 
appreciate it even more if someone did the work for me :-)

-Travis