On 12/10/2010 12:22 PM, Matthias Andree wrote:
Has anyone seen similar things?
Yes and you seem to have nailed the problem - it happens when a virus checker
hooks into a syscall and allows it to return before completion. I don't think
we want to modify Cygwin to not trust success return values from system calls.
Well, I don't know a solution but I think this is unexpected behaviour.
When some bit of third-party software patches the kernel and breaks its
API -- which includes details like "when this call returns a success
code, it means it succeeded" -- that is going to result in unexpected
behavior in any program that calls that syscall.
If you were to take a survey of existing Windows programs and sort them
according to density of calls into the deepest parts of the Windows
kernel, I'd bet Cygwin would be way over at the high-density end. Since
antimalware programs hook these same parts of the kernel to do their
job, bugs in those hooks will affect Cygwin more often than most other
Windows programs.
Cygwin doesn't -- and shouldn't -- patch around such bugs. Cygwin
probably contains code to work around bugs in Windows itself, but that's
as far as it should go.
You say you've disabled your antimalware software and the problem
persists. I doubt you've actually gotten yourself back to a stock
Windows configuration, but if so, you should be able to write a program
that will show the same behavior on anyone's system. If you can do
that, I think a fix would shortly follow. I'm not making promises of
other people's resources, just making a history-based prediction.
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