SMP filesystem corruption in 2.3.40 (and before) with sawmill "make install"

[Simon Kirby]

Hello,

As per our conversion on IRC, here are all of the details.

Installing the sawmill window manager manually on my machine seems to
sometimes cause one or more of the files in the sawmill themes directory
to be corrupted.  It appears to usually be one or more .png files in the
/usr/local/share/sawmill/0.22/themes/microGUI directory, and it's quite
easy to see because the window manager will not start (or bomb out if
restarted while in X) when a png file is corrupted.

I'm running on a dual processor box with 128 MB ECC SDRAM, and I've
noticed this back in the days when sawmill 0.15 was current (when I first
started using it).  The problem seemed to have gone away (or happened
less often, I suppose) in the last few weeks, but now it just happened
twice in a row again, when I reinstalled sawmill from within X.

In the last installation run that broke, two images appear to have been
corrupted.  I copied the directory to "microGUI.broken" and installed
again, and did a diff:

[sroot en oof:/usr/local/share/sawmill/0.22/themes]# diff -urN microGUI*
Binary files microGUI/close_normal.png and microGUI.broken/close_normal.png differ
Binary files microGUI/minimize_clicked.png and microGUI.broken/minimize_clicked.png differ

[sroot en oof:/usr/local/share/sawmill/0.22/themes]# strings microGUI.broken/close_normal.png
README
TODO
bl.png
bottom.png
br.png
close_active.png
close_clicked.png
close_normal.png
left.png
maximize_active.png
maximize_clicked.png"
maximize_normal.png
menu_active.png
menu_clicked.png%
menu_normal.png
minimize_active.png
minimize_clicked.png(
minimize_normal.png
right.png
t_bottom.png+
t_bottom_left.png
t_bottom_right.png
t_close_active.png
t_close_clicked.png
t_close_normal.png
t_left.png
t_right.png
t_top.png
t_top_left.png
t_top_right.png
theme.jl6
top_blue.png7
top_blue_inactive.png
top_curves.png
top_curves_inactive.png
top_grey.png;
top_left.

Interesting...it got overwritten with the directory that it's in!  Almost
exactly the same as the directory listing.

Sometimes this seems to happen in cache, and sometimes it seems to happen
on disk and work fine in cache.  You may want to try "make install" while
samwill is running and again without it running if you can't seem to
reproduce it.  I know I can reproduce it quit easily here, and the fact
that it corrupted two files this time seems to show that it isn't a very
hard to reproduce problem (with sawmill's "make install", at least :) ).

The filesystem it's installed on is just a standard ext2 1K block
filesystem, and I haven't really seen anything else making any corruption
on it before.

Simon-

[  Stormix Technologies Inc.  ][  NetNation Communcations Inc.  ]
[       sim en stormix.com       ][       sim en netnation.com        ]
[ Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employers. ]

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