[R-pkg-team] Bug#915321: Mutex creation failed

[Aurelien Jarno]

On 2018-12-02 21:11, Theodore Lytras wrote:
> Package: libc6
> Version: 2.28-1
> Severity: critical
> 
> Just after updating libc6 from 2.27-8 to 2.28-1 in Debian Unstable, loading package "httpuv" in R leads to a crash:
> 
>    bones at equinox2:~$ R
>    
>    R version 3.5.1 (2018-07-02) -- "Feather Spray"
>    Copyright (C) 2018 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
>    Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
>    
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>    
>    > library(httpuv)
>    terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::runtime_error'
>      what():  Mutex creation failed
>    Ακυρώθηκε
>    bones at equinox2:~$ 
> 
> From the message I understand this is directly related to libc6 and not R or httpuv. 
> Also, there was no update to R or httpuv done recently. The problem started just as I updated libc6.

From what I have been able to find, it seems to be a namespace conflict
issue between r-cran-later and glibc 2.28. r-cran-later requires C11
threads support, and when it is not available from glibc (like in 2.27),
it uses tinycthread. When upgrading to glibc 2.28, r-cran-later tries to
use the mtx_init symbol from tinycthread, but end-up using the glibc one,
leading to the above crash.

Rebuilding r-cran-later against glibc 2.28 to enable C11 threads support
from glibc is enough to fix the issue. I believe we should binNMU it and
add Breaks: on the glibc side.

-- 
Aurelien Jarno                          GPG: 4096R/1DDD8C9B
aurelien at aurel32.net                 http://www.aurel32.net