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HP Services Software Patches - vaxacrt06_070
 
NOTE:  An OpenVMS saveset or PCSI installation file is stored
       on the Internet in a self-expanding compressed file.
       The name of the compressed file will be kit_name-dcx_vaxexe
       for OpenVMS VAX or kit_name-dcx_axpexe for OpenVMS Alpha.
 
       Once the file is copied to your system, it can be expanded
       by typing RUN compressed_file.  The resultant file will
       be the OpenVMS saveset or PCSI installation file which
       can be used to install the ECO.
 
Copyright (c) Digital Equipment Corporation 1996, 1997.  All rights reserved.

PRODUCT:    OpenVMS VAX

COMPONENT:  DEC C RTL - SYS$TZDIR:[SOURCES]EUROPE. (New timezone 
                                                    source file)
                        SYS$I18N_LOCALE:IW_IL_ISO8859-8.LOCALE 
                                                   (New locale file)
                        CRTL.OBJ (Updates STARLET.OLB)
                        CRTLMSGDEF.OBJ (Updates STARLET.OLB)
                        DECC$SHR.EXE 
                        ACRT$ECO_DROP.COM (If desired, this command file
                                           may be used to remove the ECO    
                                           and restore the original         
                                           files and libraries.)           

SOURCE:     Digital Equipment Corporation

ECO INFORMATION:

     ECO Kit Name:  VAXACRT06_070
     ECO Kits Superseded by This ECO Kit:  VAXACRT05_070
                                           VAXACRT04_070
                                           VAXACRT03_070    
                                           VAXACRT02_070 (Never Released)
                                           VAXACRT01_070 
     ECO Kit Approximate Size:  3708 Blocks
     Kit Applies To:  OpenVMS VAX V7.0
     System/Cluster Reboot Necessary:  Yes

     Installation Rating:  3 - To be installed on all systems running
                               the listed versions of OpenVMS which
                               are experiencing the problems described.

     NOTE:  In order to receive the full fixes listed in this kit,
            the following remedial kits also need to be installed:

                 None


ECO KIT SUMMARY:

An ECO kit exists for the DEC C Run-Time Library on OpenVMS VAX V7.0.
This kit addresses the following problems: 

Problems Addressed in the VAXACRT06_070 Kit:

  o  The lseek function may position incorrectly when repeatedly
     called to seek in a file containing fixed length records of
     odd length.

  o  The interval timer function, setitimer, fails to reset itself
     when used in a multithreaded application.  The result is a
     single firing of the timer as opposed to repeated firing of
     the timer at fixed intervals.

  o  A change made in OpenVMS V7.1 and remedial kits to other
     versions cause calls to the mktemp function using templates of
     the form "dumpXXXXXX.txt" to no longer substitute the pattern
     with the process id.  While a change is necessary to prohibit
     substituting the directory portion in a template such as
     "[XX]dumpXXXXXX", the change that was made was overly harsh,
     forcing all substitution to the end of the pattern.

  o  The strstr function accesses memory beyond the ends of the
     strings passed.  In cases where the next page is not
     accessible, the result is an access violation.  The problem
     was reported against the ADA compiler, which uses the strstr
     function in this way.

  o  Although files in general are correctly inherited after a
     fork/exec function call, files which are opened in any sort of
     sharing mode are not.

  o  When accessing files in stream mode, closing the file may
     result in an extra byte being written to the file.  While this
     byte is not seen using the type command, it may be seen when
     using the dump utility.


Problems Addressed in the VAXACRT05_070 Kit:

  o  The stat function now uses a thread specific buffer to store data. 
     Prior to this correction, calling stat from two separate threads
     would interfere with one another. 

  o  An ISV (Internet Service Provider) reports that extra 
     characters are seen on occasion when using a subprocess which sends
     data back to the parent process using a mailbox. 

  o  A case was found where the fseek function failed, correctly returned
     a -1 value, but failed to set errno properly. 

  o  One of the arguments to the DECC$TO_VMS function is "allow_wild"
     which is documented to accept the values zero and one.  If wildcards
     are used in the file specification, they are either rejected or
     expanded into the resultant file specifications.  Passing a value of
     -1 for the allow_wild parameter now returns the file specifications
     with the wildcards intact, but after having prepared to the point of
     doing a SYS$SEARCH. 

  o  Unlike Digital UNIX, the fsync(socket_id) call results in an access
     violation instead of returning an EINVAL status. 

  o  A user reports and demonstrates that opening and closing sockets
     does not properly release mutexes eventually causing this resource
     to be exhausted.  This problem was introduced in OpenVMS V7.0. 

  o  Applications which call opendir and readdir recursively to traverse
     subdirectories may end up in an infinite loop when reading the
     directory which includes returning [000000]000000.DIR.  The readdir
     function no longer returns an entry which is equivalent to the
     directory being read. 


Problems Addressed in the VAXACRT04_070 ECO Kit:

  o  The timezone cache introduced to correct performance problems
     reported with the timezone functions incorrectly frees memory that
     is later used by the cache routines.  If the user's application
     happens to allocate and use this memory, the routines which assume
     the data in the memory was written by the DEC C RTL, may access
     violate. 

  o  Calling the stat function in a loop shows that memory is being
     leaked.  This problem was introduced in OpenVMS V7.0. 

  o  Extra  characters may be written to stdout under the conditions
     that the application is reading from stdin and it is not a terminal.
     The extra characters appear random in the output, but in fact are
     written each time a new record is read from stdin. 

  o  An application which closes either stdin, stdout, or stderr, and
     then reopens it using the dup function may not have the file
     actually closed if I/O is not done using the file descriptor.  A
     workaround is to force I/O on the file by using a function call such
     as sync or flush. 


Problems Addressed in the VAXACRT03_070 ECO Kit:

  o  The ECO kit VAXACRT02_070 correctly added the new rules for GB-EIRE,
     Additionally, VAXACRT02_070 neglected to terminate the September
     rules to not take affect in 1996. 
  o  The ECO kit VAXACRT02_070 attempted to fix a problem with printf
     which resulted in spurious characters being displayed due to an
     uninitialized buffer.  The work to reduce stack usage in printf
     reintroduced this initial problem. 


Problems Addressed in the VAXACRT02_070 ECO Kit:

  o  The time zone file for Europe needs to have a rule added to reflect
     the Seventh Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council
     of 30 May 1994 which defines the start and end dates of summer time
     throughout the EEC, using a new algorithm with effect from 1996. 

  o  The UTC based time functions, introduced in OpenVMS V7.0, caused the
     performance of these functions or "degrade enormously". 

  o  A cache for tzfiles has been introduced to improve performance.  The
     size of the cache is determined by the logical name
     DECC$TZ_CACHE_SIZE.  To accommodate most countries having both
     standard and summer time, the default cache size is two. 

  o  Dates using the Hebrew locale appear in the format MM/DD/YY, instead
     of the format DD/MM/YY.  The problem is in the source of the Hebrew
     locale, in the way the date format is defined. 

  o  Many DEC C Run-Time Library routines (fwrite in particular) are
     mistakenly REENABLING AST delivery in the case where it was disabled
     on entry to the routine. 

  o  A change occurred in how fseek works with fixed length odd byte
     record lengths.  The description of fseek in the RTL Reference
     Manual says "The function can position fixed-length record-access
     file with no carriage control or a stream-access file on any byte
     offset, ....".  Using OpenVMS V6.1, the phrase "on any byte offset"
     did not include the pad byte that RMS keeps on disk between records
     of odd length in fixed length record format sequential files.  By
     the time of OpenVMS V6.2, the phrase "on any byte offset" apparently
     includes that pad byte. 

  o  Processing VFC (Variable Fixed-length Control) files (both writing
     and reading) IN STREAM MODE is broken in OpenVMS V7.0.  This is most
     evident when the number of characters written to or read from the
     file is greater than the size of the internal I/O buffer. 

  o  The qsort function no longer access violates when sorting a large
     number of records.  This was demonstrated by sorting 1966079 records
     whose values were 1 through 1966079.  The qsort function can now
     sort the maximum number of records. 

  o  The DEC C Run-Time Library had previously added the ability for users
     to define the logical name DECC$DEFAULT_LRL to change the default
     longest record length value on stream files.  A problem existed such
     that defining this logical name to zero resulted in files which had
     fixed length records instead of stream_lf records. 

  o  Functions which write records to a file no longer access violate
     when a null record is written.  A test program which issues
     fputs(" ", stdout) followed by fputs("", stdout) can be used to
     demonstrate this problem. 

  o  The getcwd function does not correctly return the directory name,
     when the third parameter is used to specify UNIX format.  The last
     character of the resultant UNIX file name is incorrect. 

  o  The tempnam function, when generating a filename, incorrectly
     increments the character "9" to the character ":", resulting in an
     invalid filename. 

  o  The setvbuf function now limits the buffer size used to 32767 bytes.
     It further limits this value to the SYSGEN parameter MAXBUF when
     associated with a terminal device. 

  o  The DEC C Run-Time Library does not properly handle all RMS error
     codes that have secondary values returned in the stv fields.  For
     example, after a call to the open function fails, the perror
     function reports the error 'ACP create failed', but does not
     indicate the specific reason available in the secondary RMS status. 

  o  The fileno function, when called with results of a dup2 file doesn't
     return the file descriptor of the original file.  Applications
     expect that fileno(stdout) will always return one regardless of
     whether stdout was used in a call to dup2. 

  o  Testing of the printf function showed that the conversion of
     "printf("%.9sn",s)" will access all 9 characters of the string even
     if the null terminator is earlier in the string.  If the terminator
     is at the end of a page and the next page is a protected page, an
     access violation will result. 

  o  In a UNIX file system, passing "." refers to the current directory. 
     The opendir function does not accept "." as the directory name. 

  o  The opendir function now accepts directory names specified in UNIX
     format which end in a "/" character. 

  o  The ftw function has been corrected to accept both OpenVMS and UNIX
     style path arguments. 

  o  The translation of OpenVMS to UNIX file specifications should
     consistently lowercase the resultant name. 

  o  The translation of [xxx,yyy]zzz should result in /xxxyyy/zzz,
     treating both xxx and yyy as decimal characters.  The translation of
     [1,9] should not generate a numeric conversion error. 

  o  The documentation for the readdir function states that the ".dir"
     extension is removed from directory specifications, but it is not. 

  o  The DEC C Run-Time Library functions do not correctly interpret the
     standard UNIX escape character (backslash).  These characters are
     now removed from the file specification. 

  o  In contrast to what is said in the DEC C RTL Reference Manual, the
     pipe function does not ignore the second parameter.  The function
     has been corrected to ignore all values except O_NDELAY and
     O_NONBLOCK.  The documentation for this second argument will be
     changed as follows: 

          flag

          An optional argument used as a bitmask.  If either O_NDELAY
          or O_NONBLOCK bit is set, the I/O operations to the mailbox
          via array_fdscptr file descriptors terminate immediately,
          rather than waiting for another process.

          If, for example, the O_NDELAY bit is set and the child
          issues a read request to the mailbox before the parent has
          put any data into it, the read terminates immediately with
          zero status.  If neither O_NDELAY nor O_NONBLOCK bit set,
          the child will be waiting on the read until the parent
          writes any data into the mailbox.  This is the default
          behavior if no flag argument is specified.

          The values of O_NDELAY and O_NONBLOCK are defined in the
           header file.  Any other bits in the flag argument
          are ignored.  You must specify this argument if the second
          optional, positional argument bufsize is specified.  If the
          flag argument is needed only to allow specification of the
          bufsize argument, specify flag as zero.

  o  The function strnlen is marked as being an ANSI function, even
     though it is not defined by the standard.  This is important for
     customers who restrict name prefixing using /prefix=ansi.  The
     correction is to not prefix usages of strnlen when compiling with
     this qualifier. 


Problems Addressed in the VAXACRT01_070 ECO Kit:

  o  The sleep function, when passed an argument of zero, now correctly
     returns to the calling program without sleeping. 

  o  The sleep function restricts the duration of a sleep request to 9999
     days. 

  o  The mktemp function generates unique file specifications by
     replacing Xs found a user-supplied string with a derivative of the
     process id.  The problem is that only trailing Xs are to be replaced
     as opposed to Xs found throughout the string. 

  o  Files defined as having Fortran carriage control are expected to
     have control information in each record of the file.  The Run-Time
     Library now correctly defaults to space carriage control when zero
     length records are encountered. 

  o  The read function fails to load characters that have been used in
     calls to the ungetc function. 

  o  The read function was not loading characters from the unget buffer
     before reading from the disk. 

  o  A problem was introduced into the Run-Time Library such that the
     calculations of the end of file position were incorrect when the
     entire file fit into a single i/o buffer. 
  o  Prior to extending a file, the Run-Time Library ensures that the user
     has opened the file with write access.  A boundary condition existed
     such that this test was incorrectly done when positioning to the end
     of the file, but not beyond it. 

  o  In the access function, the user_group  and  user_member components
     are no longer truncated when they are larger than 255.  In addition,
     the system group now abides by the SYSGEN parameter, MAXSYSGROUP. 

  o  The truncate function has been corrected to return unused blocks to
     the file system.  Prior to this change, the number of blocks
     allocated to the file were not changed. 

  o  The printf function has been corrected to properly initialize a work
     buffer during the format string processing.  Prior to this change,
     the processing of a format specifier could result in data from the
     last specifier processed remaining in the buffer. 

  o  The functions sleep, alarm, setitimer, and usleep have been
     rewritten to make better use of Timer Queue Entries (TQEs).  Prior
     to this change, the Run-Time Library made liberal use of the
     SYS$CANWAK system service in these functions. 

  o  The readdir function returns file names to the application in either
     OpenVMS or UNIX format.  The UNIX format lowercases the name, but
     inadvertently used a locale-sensitive lowercase routine.  This was
     quite apparent using the Far East locales. 

  o  The exec functions have the ability to pass environment strings to
     the child process.  Prior to this change, a coding error prevented
     these strings from exceeded 127 bytes.  These strings can now be up
     to 255 bytes in length. 

  o  Since changing the default LRL value for stream files from 0 to
     32767, we've been informed that this change has a dramatic affect on
     sort times and workfile size.  We now look for a logical
     DECC$DEFAULT_LRL for this value, using 32767 if not defined. 

  o  The rewind function is documented to write all buffered output and
     discard all buffered input prior to rewinding the file.  Under
     certain situations, the buffer was not being flushed to disk. 

  o  The function DECC$TO_VMS, has been corrected to allow file
     specifications of the form "./aaa.-bbb" to be converted to OpenVMS
     file specification format. 

  o  The amount of stack space used by the printf functions has been
     reduced.  Prior to this change, using printf within a threaded
     application would likely exhaust the stack space. 

  o  The lseek function may position incorrectly when given the SEEK_END
     option.  Typically this occurs when the internal buffer is full and
     the last operation done to the file is flush or sync. 

  o  The fsync and flush functions will leave the file positioned at the
     end, as opposed to the original position, under certain conditions.
     These functions are not intended to move the current position. 


INSTALLATION NOTES:

In order for the corrections in this kit to take effect, the system must
be rebooted.  If the system is a member of a VMScluster, the entire
cluster should be rebooted. 

During installation you may see the following message:

  %INSTALL-E-NODELSHRADR, unable to delete image with shareable 
                          address data
  -INSTALL-I-PLSREBOOT, please reboot to install a new version of 
                        this image

This is not a cause for concern.  It simply means that DECC$SHR.EXE was
installed as a resident image, which is the standard configuration for
OpenVMS VAX V7.0 systems.  The new image will not take effect until the
system is rebooted. 


REMOVAL INSTRUCTIONS:

Remove this kit and restore the original files and libraries by logging
into the SYSTEM account, and typing the following DCL prompt: 

     @SYS$UPDATE:ACRT$ECO_DROP
Files on this server are as follows:
»vaxacrt06_070.README
»vaxacrt06_070.CHKSUM
»vaxacrt06_070.CVRLET_TXT
»vaxacrt06_070.a-dcx_vaxexe
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