Re: bizarre behavior reading files incorrectly with 4.99.72: FIXED

[Greg Troxel <gdt%ir.bbn.com@localhost>]

  Yesterday I wrote (about a core2duo/4.99.72/xen3 box):

  On the production box, there are a lot of inexplicable problems building
  things from pkgsrc.  I tracked one problem down to patch giving
  truncated results when paching configure from libtool-base and isolated
  a test case.

  With pkgsrc/devel/libtool/patches/patch-ab (75 hunks!) and configure
  from libtool-base, on most systems patch behaves as you'd expect.  But
  on the 'production' system, I end up with a patched configure that is
  mysteriously trunctated.  Looking at ktrace of patch, I found

   PID..      1 patch    GIO   fd 6 read 8 bytes
         "t_code=\""
   PID..      1 patch    GIO   fd 6 read 0 bytes
         ""

  This corresponds exactly to where the output file is truncated, and
  patch repeatedly has this behavior.  I md5'd patch, libc, libutil on
  production and qualification boxes, and they seem fine.


After rebooting, the problem remained, but the output from patch is
slightly different, and ktrace shows that the file has a phantom EOF at
a different place.  Rebooting to GENERIC had the same issue.

It turns out the problem was that /tmp (tmpfs) was 512K, not 512M.  So
there's apparently a bug in patch that fails to error out when /tmp is
too small.