[Pkg-kde-extras] Bug#563155: Bug#563155: Bug#563155: partitionmanager: does not start, and several zombie processes appear

[George Kiagiadakis]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 4:17 PM, Jan Jabbery <janjabber at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi George, thanks for your help.
> I did the strace and the ps aux, but didn't have a chance to reply. I am
> attaching the files as a .tar.gz, hope that's OK.
> There are, however, some news for me. I made an updated version of my Debian
> LiveCD, and partitionmanager now starts normally, and it seems like there
> are no zombie processes anymore...
> Best regards,
> Jan

Hi,
Looking at the strace log it seems that partitionmanager hangs while
trying to read the floppy drive:

2868  open("/dev/fd0", O_RDWR|O_DIRECT|O_LARGEFILE) = -1 EROFS
(Read-only file system)
2868  open("/dev/fd0", O_RDONLY|O_DIRECT|O_LARGEFILE) = 9
...
2868  _llseek(9, 0, [0], SEEK_SET)      = 0
2868  read(9, 0x9d89200, 512)           = -1 EIO (Input/output error)
2868  _llseek(9, 0, [0], SEEK_SET)      = 0
2868  read(9, 0x9d87a00, 512)           = -1 EIO (Input/output error)
2868  _llseek(9, 512, [512], SEEK_SET)  = 0
2868  read(9, 0x9d87a00, 512)           = -1 EIO (Input/output error)
2868  _llseek(9, 1024, [1024], SEEK_SET) = 0
2868  read(9, 0x9d87a00, 512)           = -1 EIO (Input/output error)
2868  _llseek(9, 1536, [1536], SEEK_SET) = 0
2868  read(9, 0x9d87a00, 512)           = -1 EIO (Input/output error)
2868  _llseek(9, 2048, [2048], SEEK_SET) = 0
2868  read(9, 0x9d87a00, 512)           = -1 EIO (Input/output error)
2868  _llseek(9, 2560, [2560], SEEK_SET) = 0
2868  read(9, 0x9d87a00, 512)           = -1 EIO (Input/output error)

I assume that you have no floppy drive, right? In this case you should
disable the floppy controller from the bios or blacklist the floppy
kernel module, or something like that. The problem imho is in the
floppy module. It should not allow you to open /dev/fd0 if there is no
floppy drive, but maybe there is a hardware limitation there (i.e. it
cannot detect whether there is a floppy drive or not) and there is
nothing better that it can do. Maybe if you leave it running for a few
minutes, it will finally pass this stage and open its window. I bet
gparted also suffers from this problem, as the filesystem detection
code is in libparted, which is also used by gparted.

Regarding the zombie processes, it's a bug in Qt. Partitionmanager
tries to find whether several partitioning/filesystem utilities are
installed on the system by executing them. This involves fork() +
execve(). If execve() fails (because the utility that it tries to
execute is not installed on the system), this process will be left as
a zombie because of a bug in QProcess. In your case, I guess the new
live cd that you built has all the utilities required, so that's why
there are no zombie processes left around.

Regards,
George