[Pm-utils] Stale lock file causing abort

[Victor Lowther]

On Tue, 2008-11-04 at 21:55 -0600, Robby Workman wrote:
> I've gotten a report of pm-utils failing to work suddenly working
> successfully in the past, and through use of PM_DEBUG, I've traced it
> to the presence of a stale /var/run/pm-utils/locks/pm-suspend.lock
> being present.  Looking at /usr/lib/pm-utils/functions, I don't see
> anything obviously wrong with locking functions, and of course it
> wouldn't be prudent to trap abnormal exits with lock removal, as that
> would paper over what's likely a real problem somewhere.  

Actually, pm-action removes locks via the shell trap mechanism -- the
pm-suspend lock should be removed no matter how the script exits.  The
only exceptions are if pm-action is kill -9'ed, or if the system is
restarted instead of resuming.  We don't do anything about the kill -9
case, and on the reboot case there we rely on the FHS spec that says the
distro should clean out /var/run on reboot
(http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#VARRUNRUNTIMEVARIABLEDATA).  Does Slack do that?

> Unfortunately, neither I nor the reporter have been able to reproduce
> it since that one instance, so I'm at a loss on how to further
> troubleshoot this.  Has anyone else had this happen, and if so, did you
> figure out what was causing it?  

It used to happen to me all the time while writing the locking code.  I
haven't seen it happen since we released 1.1.0, though. :)

> -RW
> _______________________________________________
> Pm-utils mailing list
> Pm-utils at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/pm-utils
-- 
Victor Lowther
RHCE# 805008539634727
LPIC-2# LPI000140019