OPENVMS ALPACRT06_070 Alpha V7.0 DEC C RTL ECO Summary
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: DIGITAL OpenVMS Alpha
COMPONENTS: DEC C RTL - DECC$SHR.EXE
CRTLMSGDEF.OBJ (Updates STARLET.OLB)
CRTL.OBJ (Updates STARLET.OLB)
ACRT$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: ALPACRT06_070
ECO Kits Superseded by This ECO Kit: ALPACRT05_070
ALPACRT04_070
ALPACRT03_070
ALPACRT02_070
ALPACRT01_070
ECO Kit Approximate Size: 15,534 Blocks
Kit Applies To: OpenVMS Alpha 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 DEC C Run-Time Library on OpenVMS Alpha V7.0.
This kit addresses the following problems:
Problems Addressed in the ALPACRT06_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.
o The functions atof, strtod, and wcstod incorrectly return HUGE_VAL
values when compiling with the IEEE_FLOAT and an IEEE_MODE qualifier
of DENORM_RESULTS. The results returned have been modified to take
the compilation mode of the calling program into account. The
return value can now be compared against HUGE_VAL.
o The following code segment demonstrates a problem in the
printf family of functions running on OpenVMS for Alpha.
double n;
for (n = 9.0e16; n < 11.0e17; n += 1.0e+17)
printf ("%20.0f\n", n);
The result is that the final zero is missing in the display of
all but the first and last line.
Problems Addressed in the ALPACRT05_070 Kit:
o The stat function now uses a thread specific buffer to store
data. Prior to this correction, stat called from two
separate threads would interfere with one another.
o An ISV reports that extra characters are seen on occasion
when using a subprocess that sends data back to the parent
process using a mailbox.
o A case was found where the fseek function fails. It
correctly returns a -1 value, but fails 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 Opening and closing sockets does not properly release mutexes.
This problem which was introduced in OpenVMS V7.0 eventually
causes the mutex resources to be exhausted.
o Applications which call opendir and readdir recursively to traverse
subdirectories may end up in an infinite loop when reading the
directory that 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 ALPACRT04_070 Kit:
o The sscanf function inadvertently truncates a 64-bit pointer when
assigning values to that pointer. The simple statement
sscanf("s","%s",x) will access violate if "x" is a 64-bit pointer.
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 ALPACRT03_070 Kit:
o The ECO kit ALPACRT02_070 correctly added the new rules for GB-EIRE,
Additionally, ALPACRT02_070 neglected to terminate the September
rules to not take affect in 1996.
o The ECO kit ALPACRT02_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. Both problems are now corrected.
Problems Addressed in the ALPACRT02_070 Kit:
o The DEC C Runtime Library functions whose name are of the form
decc$fmath_2, are defined in STARLET, but are not universal symbols
in the DECC$SHR image. When these functions are referenced by an
application, linking the image results in inclusion of the DECC$SHR
image from IMAGELIB and the specific C math modules from STARLET.
If neither the DPML$SHR image or the CMA$TIS_SHR image were already
brought in during the IMAGELIB phase, the object form is included
from STARLET. This is due to the reference to these symbols
appearing in the STARLET phase. On OpenVMS V7.0, this results in
the undefined symbols:
CMA$TIS_ERRNO_SET_VALUE
CMA$TIS_VMS_ERRNO_SET_VALUE
After adding the decc$fmath_2 symbols to the DECC$SHR image, both
the DPML$SHR and CMA$TIS_SHR references are resolved using shareable
images found in IMAGELIB.
o The time zone file for Europe needs to have a rule added to reflect
the Seventh Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council
of 30 May 1994 which defines the start and end dates of summer time
throughout the EEC, using a new algorithm with effect from 1996.
o The UTC based time functions, introduced in OpenVMS V7.0, caused the
performance of these functions or "degrade enormously".
A cache for tzfiles has been introduced to improve performance. The
size of the cache is determined by the logical name
DECC$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 Runtime 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 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 DEC C Runtime 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 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 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.
The DEC C Runtime 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.
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 Runtime 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 ALPACRT01_070 Kit:
o The sleep function, when passed an argument of zero, now
correctly returns to the calling program without sleeping.
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 runtime
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.
The read() function was not loading characters from the unget buffer
before reading from the disk.
o A problem was introduced into the runtime 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 runtime 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 MAXSYSGROUP SYSGEN parameter.
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 runtime 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$DEFAULT_LRL for this value, using 32767 if not defined.
o The stat function, after failing to locate a file, appends ".dir" to
the name and then repeats the lookup. The problem was that this was
being done to names which already had an extension, resulting in an
invalid name instead of a file not found.
o The atof function no longer generates a high performance arithmetic
trap when passed an IEEE denorm floating point number. The
underlying function is now told to treat denorms as zero.
o The rewind function is documented to write all buffered output and
discard all buffered input prior to rewinding the file. Under
certain situations, the buffer was not being flushed to disk.
o The function decc$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 family of functions has
been reduced. Prior to this change, using these functions within a
threaded application could 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.
NOTE: During installation the following message may be seen:
%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 Alpha V7.0 systems. The new
image will not take effect until the system is rebooted.
This patch can be found at any of these sites:
Colorado Site
Georgia Site
European Site
Files on this server are as follows:
alpacrt06_070.README
alpacrt06_070.CHKSUM
alpacrt06_070.CVRLET_TXT
alpacrt06_070.a-dcx_axpexe
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