[20143] in Athena Bugs
Re: gs hangs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Larry Stone)
Fri Feb 1 16:02:00 2002
Date: Fri, 1 Feb 2002 16:01:58 EST
From: Larry Stone <lcs@MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: <lcs@MIT.EDU>
To: Garry Zacheiss <zacheiss@MIT.EDU>, bugs@MIT.EDU, boojum@MIT.EDU,
kenclary@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of Fri, 01 Feb 2002 13:49:35 -0500
Message-ID: <CMM.0.90.4.1012597318.lcs@defiant.mit.edu>
> From: Laura Baldwin <boojum@MIT.EDU>
> To: bugs@mit.edu
> In-reply-to: [20139]
> cc: kenclary@mit.edu
> Subject: gs hangs
>
>
> The 7.03 version of gs seems to hang when converting to ps. A simple
> sample is to use ps2pdf, which ends up calling gs; a somewhat minimal
> case is:
>
> gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=foo.pdf -f nonexistentfile.ps
>
> (it also hangs for existent files, but it clearly hasn't even gotten
> to the point of looking for the file). It creates a zero-length
> foo.pdf in the process.
What platform does this happen on? I'm guessing Athena 9.0 Solaris.
This appears to be caused by a hang reading from /dev/random.
If the command
dd count=1 if=/dev/random
also hangs, then that's your problem. I cured the symptom by restarting
the cryptorand daemon; as root,
sh /etc/init.d/cryptorand stop
sh /etc/init.d/cryptorand start
wait a couple minutes (for some entropy to build up), and try gs again.
Meanwhile, I will look for the cause and try to get gs to not
rely on /dev/random.
-- Larry
