Updated: 24-SEP-2003 (Use your browsers' Reload button to ensure you're viewing the most recent version)
VAXACRT10_071 VAX V7.1 DEC C RTL ECO Summary
Copyright (c) Compaq Computer Corporation 1997, 1999, 2001. All rights reserved.
New Kit Date : 28-SEP-2001
Modification Date: Not Applicable
Modification Type: Updated Kit Supersedes VAXACRT09_071
PRODUCT: OpenVMS VAX
COMPONENT: 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: Compaq Computer Corporation
ECO INFORMATION:
ECO Kit Name: VAXACRT10_071
ECO Kits Superseded by This ECO Kit: VAXACRT09_071
VAXACRT08_071
VAXACRT07_071
VAXACRT06_071
VAXCRTL05_071
VAXACRT04_071
VAXACRT03_071
VAXACRT02_071
VAXACRT01_071
ECO Kit Approximate Size: 4080 Blocks
Kit Applies To: OpenVMS VAX V7.1
System/Cluster Reboot Necessary: Yes
Rolling Reboot Supported: Yes
Installation Rating: INSTALL_3
3 - To be installed on all systems running
the listed versions of OpenVMS which
are experiencing the problems described.
Kit Dependencies:
The following remedial kit(s) must be installed BEFORE
installation of this kit:
None
In order to receive all the corrections listed in this
kit, the following remedial kits should also be installed:
None
ECO KIT SUMMARY:
An ECO kit exists for DEC C Run-Time Library on OpenVMS VAX V7.1.
This kit addresses the following problems:
PROBLEMS ADDRESSED IN VAXACRT10_071 KIT:
o Function mktime()'s algorithm locked thread specific data,
which didn't need to be done. This change uses stack
allocated data, and improves performance.
o Function open() had unnecessary calls to SYS$GETJPI. These
were removed.
o Several problems in function mmap() and munmap() were
addressed.
- Function munmap() would sometimes fail when releasing
memory allocated with MAP_ANON. This is because it
wrongly tried to deassign a file channel that was not
associated with the memory range.
- Function mmap() was incorrectly specifying global memory
when MAP_ANON is specified.
Change will only do this with flag MAP_SHARED specified.
o Function gettimeofday() now sets errno and vaxc$errno
appropriately if UTC time functions fail because of a system
service failure.
o The file creation functions (fopen, open, creat) have been
corrected to not inherit file attributes if a directory by the
same name exists for the file being created. For example,
creating a file named "foo." in a directory which contained a
"foo.dir" would incorrectly inherit file attributes from this
directory file.
o The stat function no longer puts the wrong values into
st_?time members of the stat structure. More precisely,
during daylight savings time the values of st_?time are no
longer one hour ahead from file creation/modification time
reported by the $DIRECTORY command.
o The time functions time, ftime, gettimeofday and getclock
would fail for a TDF (time differential factor) of -13 hours,
the value required in New Zealand. According to the U.S.
Naval Observatory information the valid range for the TDF is
-13.75 to +13, inclusive. The C RTL now allows this full
range.
o In the previous ECO kit, a change was introduced to the
function strptime() for XPG5-compatibility to handle
expressions for the 2-digit year format %y when the century
was not specified. The requirement is for 2-digit years in
the range 0-68 to be treated as 21st century and years in the
range 69-99 as 20th century. The 2-digit years in the range
69-99 were incorrectly being treated as 21st century.
o The execlp and execvp functions were unconditionally prefixing
the file specification of the image to be run in the child
process with "VAXC$PATH:" string. When passed a fully
qualified file specification, this would result in an invalid
file specification.
o The behavior of lseek() and fseek() at positions beyond the
end of data in a file were not conforming to the POSIX/ANSI
standard. The file was being physically null padded on disk
even though the standard only requires this null padding if
data is actually written at this point. In the case reported
by the user, seeking to the end of a file by using a large
offset would take a long time and may exhaust available disk
space. To get the POSIX behavior, you must define
DECC$POSIX_SEEK_STREAM_FILE as "ENABLE". The default behavior
is unchanged.
o The Compaq C RTL was enhanced to open all files for shared
access as if the "shr=del,get,put,upd" option was specified in
the open* or creat call. To enable this feature, define the
logical name DECC$FILE_SHARING to the value "ENABLE". The
value is case-insensitive and is checked only once per image
activation, not on a file-by-file basis.
o The Compaq C RTL was failing when the amount of data written
to a pipe exceeded the buffer size of that pipe. The RTL now
breaks the large write into a sequence of writes whose size is
the size of the underlying mailbox used to implement pipes.
o A problem was reported that the RTL could hang if exit were
called while threads were continuing to do I/O. Analysis
showed that the hang was caused by a thread holding the lock
necessary to close the file and the exit handler blocking on
this lock. The change implemented was to not attempt to close
files whose locks were currently in use.
o When a stream file is extended using ftruncate() it is
documented that the extended area will be filled with zeroes.
This is now done correctly. Prior to this change, the file
was not extended.
o The documentation of the select function states that it
returns either when a socket is ready to be read or written,
when the timeout period expires, or when exceptions occur. It
was not properly terminating when an exception occurred. This
problem was corrected by dynamically linking to and calling an
abort function in the socket library. A complete correction
to interrupting the select function will also require an ECO
kit from the Compaq TCP/IP product which includes this new
abort function.
o The fstat function was corrected to not access violate when
called with stdin, stdout, stderr, or a directory
specification.
o The chdir function was not well behaved when the calling
program passed an argument which was a search list logical.
The chdir function was unconditionally changing the logical
sys$disk to the first member of the search list was
effectively dropping the remaining members. More work may be
done in this area in future releases of the C RTL.
PROBLEMS ADDRESSED IN VAXACRT09_071 KIT:
o getenv() function looks for CLI symbol only in user mode
The getenv() function has been corrected to check for a
Command Line Interpreter (CLI) symbol only when called in user
access mode. While DEC C RTL is a user-mode run time library,
a decision was made to correct getenv() in order to make the
library more robust. The reason for this change is because
calling the CLI from within exec or kernel mode may result in
an access violation.
With this fix, when called from inner access mode, the
getenv() function will search only the C environment list and
OpenVMS logical names.
This fix does not mean, however, that the user-mode only
restriction was lifted. It is still unsupported to call the
DEC C RTL functions, including getenv(), in any access mode
other than in user-mode.
o strptime() function made XPG5-compliant
The strptime() function has been modified to comply with
X/Open CAE Specification System Interfaces and Headers Issue 5
(commonly known as XPG5). In XPG5, how the strptime()
function processes the "%y" directive was changed for a
two-digit year within the century, if no century is specified.
According to XPG5, for the "%y" directive, when a century is
not otherwise specified, values in the range 69-99 refer to
years in the twentieth century (1969 to 1999 inclusive), while
values in the range 00-68 refer to years in the twenty-first
century (2000 to 2068 inclusive). Essentially, for the "%y"
directive, strptime() became a "pivoting" function with 69
being a pivoting year.
Before this change, the strptime() function was always
interpreting a two-digit year with no century as a year within
the twentieth century.
With the current ECO kit, XPG5-compliant strptime() becomes a
default strptime() function in the DEC C RTL. However, for
compatibility reasons, the previous "non-pivoting"
XPG4-compliant strptime() function was retained.
The "pivoting" is controlled by the DECC$XPG4_STRPTIME logical
name. Defining this logical name prior to invoking the
application (any equivalence string) will cause the DEC C RTL
to use the "non-pivoting" flavor of strptime(). Also,
"non-pivoting" strptime() can be called directly as the
decc$strptime_xpg4() function.
While there is an easy way to disable "pivoting" by just
defining a logical name, you should be aware that if the
application ceases to work correctly due to the change in the
strptime() function, it almost certainly means that there is a
Y2K problem in the application. Y2K-safe applications should
not be affected by the change in strptime().
o stat() function processes top-level directory of concealed
device
The stat() function has been corrected to process file
specifications such as "foo:[000000]", where foo is defined as
a concealed device like the following:
$ define/trans=(conc) foo device:[bar.]
Prior to this fix, the stat() function would fail for such a
file specification with errno set to ENOENT (No such file or
directory).
o system() function always returns correct status
Both flavors of the system() function were corrected to ensure
that the function always returns the correct status.
The POSIX-compliant system() function has been corrected to
always return a status corresponding to the signal, which
terminated the child process if the child process was
terminated due to receiving a signal.
Prior to this fix, there was a small timing window when the
function could return the status corresponding to the child
process completion code, even in the case when the child
process was terminated by a signal.
The Non-POSIX system() function has been corrected to always
return the OpenVMS completion code of the child process.
Prior to this fix, there was a small timing window when the
function could return the status from LIB$SPAWN(), instead of
the completion code of the child process.
None of these problems were ever reported by a customer.
o opendir() and readdir() functions process remote directory
The opendir() and readdir() functions have been corrected to
process directories on a remote node specified using the
following DECnet file specification:
nodename"username password"::device:[directory]
Prior to this fix, opendir() could fail with errno set to
ENOTDIR (Not a directory). In the case when opendir() could
successfully open the directory, the readdir() function could
return incorrect file names.
o times() and clock() functions were made AST-reentrant
The times() and clock() functions have been modified to be
both thread-safe and AST-reentrant.
Prior to this change, these functions belonged to the class of
functions which are thread safe, but not AST-reentrant (see
section 1.7.2 Multithread Restrictions in the DEC C RTL
Reference Manual).
The change in the reentrancy status of the times() and clock()
functions will be reflected in the next release of the Manual.
o stat() function no longer fails due to failure of mktime()
function
The stat() function no longer fails due to the failure of the
mktime() function.
It was reported that the stat() function fails for a file
created on April 4th 1999 at 2:04 a.m. EST, which is the
"missing hour" in the transition from standard to daylight
saving time in the Eastern time zone.
The problem was due to the failure of the mktime() function to
process the "missing hour" (stat() calls mktime() to fill
st_?time members of the stat structure with the UTC time).
While the mktime() function was not fixed, the stat() function
was corrected to handle the failure of mktime() and set
st_?time fields correctly, even if mktime() fails.
Note, that, strictly speaking, "missing hour" is an invalid
input for mktime(): there is no such time as "April 4th 1999
2:04 a.m.", for example, in the Eastern time zone. Given the
possibility of calling mktime() with an invalid time, the
stat() function probably should not have used mktime() in the
first place or at least should have been prepared for a
mktime() failure.
o select() function was made standard compliant
The select() function has been corrected to return a failure
status if either an invalid file descriptor or file descriptor
not associated with a socket is found in one of the specified
file descriptor sets. In the case of an invalid file
descriptor, the select() function sets errno to EBADF. In
case of a file descriptor not associated with a socket, the
function sets errno to ENOTSOCK.
Failure with errno set to EBADF is the standard requirement
for the select() function. Failure with errno set to ENOTSOCK
occurs because the select() function can currently operate
only on sockets.
Prior to this fix, the function was setting errno as described
above, but otherwise was ignoring invalid file descriptors and
file descriptors not associated with sockets.
The old behavior can be requested by defining the logical name
DECC$SELECT_IGNORES_INVALID_FD prior to invoking the
application (any equivalence string).
o "Y2038 bug" fixed
The problem commonly known as the "Y2038 bug" has been fixed.
The C run-time library time functions, which access the
current time using the OpenVMS time functions, have been
corrected to handle times after 19-Jan-2038 3:14:07. Data
type time_t is defined on OpenVMS as an unsigned 32-bit
integer. However, some of the functions which retrieve
current time from the system and convert it to time_t format
were using signed arithmetic.
This fix affects the functions:
o decc$fix_time()
o time()
o ftime()
o gettimeofday()
o getclock()
With this fix, DEC C RTL time functions will handle times
successfully until 07-Feb-2106 06:28:15.
o Improved handling of low memory condition by printf()
The printf() family of functions have been enhanced to perform
better when the calling application has exhausted available
memory.
o Fixed access to files on UNIX over DECnet
The file access functions have been corrected to process file
names on UNIX systems over DECnet. The file name for a file
on a UNIX system accessed over DECnet was being converted to
uppercase, even when the name was enclosed in double quotes.
This problem was introduced on OpenVMS V7.2 and also affects
OpenVMS V7.1-2 and OpenVMS V7.2-1. File names of the form
node::"dir/name" are now processed correctly.
Problems addressed in VAXACRT08_071:
o For DEC C Run-Time Library (RTL) functions, a call with a too
long filename argument could result in an access violation.
o After installing the VAXY2K01_071 kit, for an existing file,
the open() function failed with errno EEXIST, when called with
the O_EXEC flag, but without the O_CREAT flag.
Prior to the VAXACRT02_071 ECO kit, the behavior was as if the
open function was replacing the O_EXCL flag with the O_CREAT
flag, if the former was specified alone so that the function
was successfully opening an existing file when called with a
single O_EXCL flag. The current kit restores this behavior.
o One could possibly specify none, one or both options for
MAP_SHARED/MAP_PRIVATE and MAP_FIXED/MAP_VARIABLE. However,
the documentation (in both cases) states that you must specify
only one of each of these options and also just one of
MAP_FILE/MAP_ANONYMOUS (defaults to MAP_FILE if not specified
at all as it is represented by a single bit in the flags
parameter).
Furthermore, a call to the munmap() function to unmap a
PRIVATE section modifies errno, even though success is
returned by the function.
o The functions from the exec family of functions no longer
forced activation on-disk images. The regression was
introduced in the VAXACRT03_071 kit and occurred regardless of
how the image file was specified in the call to the exec
function. The problem prevented activation of installed
images, because the explicit file version in the file spec
prevented image activator from known-file lookups.
As the result of this problem, the child process was always
running an on-disk version of the image. If the image that
was supposed to be executed by the child process was installed
with privileges, the child process would not get expected
privileges and would fail while attempting to perform an
operation which required privileges provided by the installed
image.
o The Chown function changed the owner of a file to [-1,-1],
when passed with owner and group arguments of -1.
o The DCL Pn (P1, P2, etc.) parameters passed to a DCL child
were uppercased.
o A performance problem with the %d, %o, %x, %u and %c printf
format specifiers occurred. Consequently, after installing
several ECO kits, a regular job was taking about twice the
normal time to complete.
o After installing the VAXACRT06_071 ECO kit, a performance
problem in UTC-based time functions was introduced. An
application detected roughly an order of magnitude increase in
elapsed time due to the decc$__utc_mktime CRTL function. This
slowdown was attributed to the change done in thread local
storage macros when these macros were made AST-safe.
o EXEC functions failed with the errno set to ENOEXEC (exec
format error) when requested to activate a shareable image.
The regression was introduced in VAXACRT03_071 and the problem
happened on OpenVMS V7.1 or higher, when using the DEC C RTL
backport object library.
o The mmap function was enhanced to accept an optional integer
argument specifying additional flags to be passed to the
SYS$CRMPSC system service for a MAP_SHARED request.
Applications making use of an additional argument must be
compiled with DEC C Version 6.0 or higher. The new signature
of the mmap function is as follows:
void mmap (void *addr, size_t len, int prot, int flags,
int filedes, off_t off); (X/OPEN, POSIX)
void mmap (void *addr, size_t len, int prot, int flags,
int filedes, off_t off ...); (DEC C EXTENSION)
Using the optional argument, the caller can create, for
example, a system global section (SEC$M_SYSGBL bit) or
permanent global section (SEC$M_PERM bit). Here, to create a
system permanent global section, the caller can specify
(SEC$M_SYSGBL | SEC$M_PERM) in the optional argument.
The mmap function does not check or set any privileges. The
caller's responsibility is to set appropriate privileges, such
as the SYSGBL privilege for SEC$M_SYSGBL and PRMGBL for
SEC$M_PERM, before calling mmap with the optional argument.
o The DECC$FIX_TIME function could return a meaningless value
and the caller had no way to check whether the function
succeeded or not.
The DEC C RTL Manual shipped with the DEC C V6.0 compiler
indicates that the DECC$FIX_TIME function may fail as follows:
Return Values
x A longword containing the number of
seconds since 00:00 January 1, 1970.
(unsigned int)(-1) Indicates an error. Be aware, that a
return value of (unsigned int)(-1)
can also represent a valid date of
Sun Feb 7 06:28:15 2106.
Problems addressed in VAXACRT07_071:
o Installation of the VAXACRT06_071 remedial kit failed due to
a global symbol error.
Problems addressed in VAXACRT06_071:
o Internal testing revealed that on DIGITAL UNIX, the
en_US.ISO8859-1 locale classifies the <y-diaeresis> character
(codepoint xff) as a print and graph character as it should be,
while on OpenVMS this character does not belong to any
character class.
o Two new fcntl requests defined by X/Open and POSIX were
implemented:
#include <types.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
int fcntl(int fildes, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC);
int fcntl(int fildes, F_GETFD);
fcntl(fildes, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) sets the FD_CLOEXEC flag for
a specified file descriptor. If the FD_CLOEXEC flag is set,
the file descriptor is not passed to a child process spawned by
one of the exec functions. In other words, the FD_CLOEXEC flag
prevents normal inheritance of the open file descriptor by the
child process.
Fcntl(fildes, F_GETFD) returns flags associated with a
specified file descriptor. If the FD_CLOEXEC flag was set,
fcntl will return FD_CLOEXEC.
o The ioctl fails with a "can't assign requested address" status
when called with FIONREAD request code for a socket device.
The cause of the failure is that the FIONREAD macro is defined
differently in the <ioctl.h> header and in the <ucx$inetdef.h>
header. The underlying UCX routine expects the value from the
<ucx$inetdef.h> header. The ioctl function was fixed to call
the UCX routine with the value of FIONREAD presented in the
<ucx$inetdef.h> header.
o The child process spawned by one of the functions from the exec
family didn't inherit the file offset and file append mode from
the parent as required by the X/Open specifications and the
POSIX standard.
To have this correction not break existing applications, the
correct behavior of inheritance of the file offset and append
mode by the child process must be enabled. This enabling is
done by defining the logical name
DECC$EXEC_FILEATTR_INHERITANCE (any equivalence string) prior
to the first call to any function from the exec family.
o With the retirement of the OpenVMS POSIX product, providing
capabilities and interfaces defined by the POSIX standard
becomes extremely important. Hence, the DEC C RTL is often
perceived by customers as a "natural" replacement of the POSIX
run-time environment on the OpenVMS system.
This checkin adds to the DEC C RTL shm_open() and shm_unlink()
shared memory functions. They are defined by the POSIX
Realtime Extension (1003.1b-1993/1003.1i-1995) and X/Open CAE
Specification, Issue 5. Both functions exist on OpenVMS POSIX
and DIGITAL UNIX.
With the new DEC C V5.7 compiler, an OpenVMS build of the CRTL
facility fails on compilation of CRTL mapping tables:
RTLENTRIES.C module. The failure is:
$ CC/NOLIST/NOPREFIX/OBJECT=OBJ$:RTLENTRIES.OBJ -
SRC$:RTLENTRIES.C
CXXENTRY("__nw__xui", ANSI, ____, ____, ____, ____, ____,
____, ____, ____, ____),
^
%CC-W-TOOMANY, In the initializer for routine_names, there are
855 elements, which is 854 too many. The extra initializers
will be ignored.
o The system default (DEFMBXMXMSG SYSGEN parameter) was used for
the mailbox maximum message size (maxmsg), while creating a
mailbox associated with the pipe.
Before this change, the maxmsg was set to 512, the value
documented in the description of the pipe function in the DEC C
Run-Time Library Reference Manual for OpenVMS. Since the read
function transfers not more than maxmsg bytes from a pipe, this
change broke applications relying on the 512-byte limit.
o Functions lseek and fseek were fixed to position a fixed-length
records file to the last written byte when SEEK_END is
specified. Previously, the functions were positioning such a
file to the end of the last fixed-length record, regardless of
whether the last record contains a full amount of data or not.
To have this correction not break existing applications, the
new behavior must be enabled by defining the logical name
DECC$FIXED_LENGTH_SEEK_TO_EOF (any equivalence string).
o For an upgrade from OpenVMS V6.2 to V7.x, when writing a file
with FORTRAN carriage control that was used with "ctx=nocvt"
and "mrs=132", the C Run-Time Library (RTL) no longer generated
a record on each call to the output CRTL function. Instead,
the RTL accumulated the data until the maximum record size (132
bytes) was reached and then wrote everything as a single
record.
o A new function facilitating validation of a wide character was
implemented, which has the following interface:
int decc$validate_wchar(wchar_t wc);
The decc$validate_wchar function returns 1 (one) if specified
wide character is a valid wide character in the current
program's locale and zero otherwise.
Problems addressed in VAXCRTL05_071:
o The cache of values introduced in the getenv function
caused regressions to occur in numerous applications.
The default has been changed from using the cache to only
using the cache when a specific logical is set. This new
logical, DECC$ENABLE_GETENV_CACHE, should be set prior to
invoking an application whose performance depends on using
the getenv cache. The logical DECC$DISABLE_GETENV_CACHE
is no longer used.
o Attempts to open a network mailbox fail.
o A correction was made to the rewind function which now
works correctly for a file opened using the append access mode.
o The fread function no longer access violates when passed
stdin. This error only occurred when the stdin file
descriptor was a socket descriptor inherited from a parent
C process.
o The dup2 function would access violate when called with
the second file descriptor larger than 256.
o An ISV porting software to OpenVMS sought assistance in
handling parameters being passed to the image when invoked
as a foreign command. A new function has been added which
gives an application control over how arguments to the image
are obtained. The new function is specified as:
int decc$$set_get_foreign(const char* image_name,
const char* image_location,
const char* routine_name)
If this function is called prior to the C main program, the
DEC C RTL will call this routine instead of LIB$GET_FOREIGN to
obtain the parameters.
o Performance improvements previously applied to only the
sprintf function being called with a "%s" format specifier
have now been made in all functions which use thread specific
data. Applications which use DECthreads and the DEC C RTL
may see significant performance improvements when calling
functions which use thread specific data, such as those listed
in section 1.7.1 of the reference manual.
o Data inconsistencies occurred when the sprintf function
was called by both an AST routine and the main program.
o It was reported that the functions strtol, strtoul, wcstol,
wcstoul, and the OpenVMS Alpha specific functions strtoq and
strtouq do not consume the trailing digits after an overflow
condition. This behavior is required by the ANSI standard.
To have this correction not break existing applications, the
correct behavior of consuming these characters must be enabled
by defining the logical name DECC$STRTOL_ERANGE prior to the
first call to any of these functions.
Problems addressed in VAXACRT04_071:
o The mmap function no longer fails if a file is opened with
read access and the calling program has specified both the
PROT_WRITE and MAP_PRIVATE flags. The correct behavior of
using the MAP_PRIVATE flag is to disregard the access mode of
the opened file.
o The opendir function no longer fails if a file having the same
name, but no extension, exists in the same directory as the
directory being opened. Prior to this change, having an
extensionless file in the same directory as the directory
being opened would fail, even if the full name and extension
was used in the opendir call.
o Changes made in OpenVMS V7.0 have affected the processing of
files having "FORTRAN Carriage Control" record attributes.
The following changes were introduced in OpenVMS V7.0 and are
repaired in this ECO kit:
+ The DEC C RTL now prepends (instead of appends) linefeed
characters to records with the single-space carriage
control. This was the behavior prior to OpenVMS V7.0.
Prefixing this type of record with linefeeds is what RMS
requires and allows overprinting to work better than when
the linefeed was appended.
The only known problem with the new version is that the
carriage-control character is not generated after the last
file record. This problem will be fixed in the next release
of CRTL."
o A regression was introduced in the VAXACRT03_071 ECO kit such
that calls to the stat function which use the "DNA=STRING"
parameter access violate. Calls to fopen may also access
violate when the fopen function calls stat to determine if the
file exists.
Problems addressed in VAXACRT03_071:
o Users have requested that kill support the POSIX semantics of
"if the process id is negative but not -1, the signal will be
sent to all processes whose group ID is equal to the absolute
value of the process id, and for which the process has
permission to send a signal." This has been added with the
restrictions that the process is executing on the same node
and does not have a SYSTEM UIC. The errno value is set to
ESRCH if no processes are found which match the condition
specified.
o The performance of DEC C sprintf was three times slower than
VAX C. An analysis of the printf engine resulted in changes
which brings DEC C within 10% of VAX C.
o The functions fopen and freopen were mapping invalid access
modes to read mode. Invalid modes now cause errno to be set
to EINVAL and the open call to fail.
o The times function was changed in OpenVMS V7.0 to return the
number of clock ticks since boot time. Performing year 2000
testing by setting the system time forward causes this return
value to overflow. The times function has been changed to
return the number of clock ticks since login time, which is
less likely to overflow.
o The lseek function may position incorrectly with repeated
calls to seek in a file containing fixed length records of
odd length. This problem does not occur with even length
or variable length records.
o Mailbox devices are record-oriented devices, except when
created by the pipe function where they are opened as stream
devices. Applications which use mailboxes can now force the
library to treat all mailboxes as stream devices by creating
an environment variable named DECC$MAILBOX_CTX_STM.
o The runtime library has been corrected to treat UNIX directory
specifications identically in each of the routines which
accept a directory specification as a parameter. These
runtime library functions are access, opendir, mkdir, and
rmdir. Prior to this change, one could call opendir with
"/dev/dir", but was forced to append ".dir" to this when
calling the access function.
o This ECO kit includes major performance improvements when
using time-related functions along with Universal Coordinated
Time.
A cache of values has been added to the getenv function to
avoid the library making repeated calls to translate a logical
name, or to obtain a symbol value for environment variables
which are not set. If your application makes direct calls to
set logical names, this caching can be disabled by defining
DECC$DISABLE_GETENV_CACHE prior to calling any runtime library
functions.
o The ANSI standard states that streams opened in update mode
may read and write to the stream. It further states that
reads must be followed by file positioning prior to writing
to the stream. The problem corrected was that positioning
functions would fail when the file was a terminal. Applications
may now position such streams back to the beginning using either
rewind or seek.
o It was reported that opendir overflowed the stack when running
in a threaded application. While correcting this problem, the
opendir successful return value was changed from one to zero
to align with with the X/Open Specifications.
o A problem introduced in OpenVMS V7.1 causes the first record
of a file to be overwritten when the file is opened in append
mode. The correct behavior is that all write operations are
done at the end of the file.
o Porting code to OpenVMS is hampered by the difference between
command procedures and executable images and the mechanisms
necessary to invoke them. When passed the string "TEST",
the exec functions now search for "TEST.", "TEST.EXE", and
"TEST.COM". If found, it is executed as either an image or
a command procedure, depending on information in the file
header.
o Several new universals have been added to the DECC$SHR image
shipped with this ECO kit. The presence of these universals
may affect application developers who compile using this
image. If a developer begins to get errors of the form
%LINK-W-MULDEF, symbol DECC$XXX multiply defined
in module DECC$SHR file SYS$COMMON:[SYSLIB]DECC$SHR.EXE;1
while linking the application, the compile command should be
modified to include "/PREFIX=EXCEPT=XXX". This instructs the
compiler to exclude this function when doing name prefixing,
which is equivalent to the behavior prior to this ECO kit.
o The printf function was enhanced to print "(null)" when passed
a null pointer to be used with the "%S" format specifier.
Prior to this, the DEC C RTL would issue an access violation
error.
o Several functions were found to not accept the angle bracket
form of directory specifications. These functions include
decc$translate_vms and stat, which now accept either square
brackets or angle brackets in the directory portion of file
specifications.
o The exec functions use a mailbox to coordinate open file
information between the parent and child processes. A user
reported their system hung after 1000 successful invocations
of the same child process. This hang was caused by the parent
process failing to release an exclusive mode lock being used
to coordinate access to the mailbox. The hang would occur
when a mailbox was assigned to the parent process for a second
time.
o A user reports calling ioctl sets errno to ENOSYS (Function
not implemented). Beginning with OpenVMS V7.0, the library
looks for support in the underlying TCPIP stack and sets this
error if the support is not found. The function has been
enhanced to execute UCX$EXAMPLES:UCX$IOCTL_ROUTINES under
these conditions.
o The decc$to_vms function has been enhanced to recognize names
found on other systems, converting "/dev/null" to "NLA0:",
"/tmp" to "SYS$SCRATCH:", and "/bin" to "SYS$SYSTEM:".
o The getpwnam function now uppercases the username parameter if
it is not found in its original form. Prior to this change,
the function would fail.
Problems addressed in VAXACRT02_071:
o Those functions, such as printf, which have thread specific
data incorrectly use the threads interface to release that
memory when a thread is being destroyed. The result is that
all thread specific memory is lost.
o The read, fread, write, and fwrite DEC C RTL functions now
return unsuccessful status with errno set to EINVAL if one of
the arguments of size_t type or total number of bytes to be
transmitted is not in the range 0 to INT_MAX. The total number
of bytes is the product of the size_of_item and number_items
arguments for fread and fwrite functions. The value of INT_MAX
is defined in the <limits.h> header file.
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 The ECO kits ALPACRT01_071 and VAXACRT01_071 made changes to
the return value of the puts and fputs routines. While these
changes were in line with the documentation, which states that
they return non-negative numbers on success, specific
applications were coded to expect zero as success. Since this
zero return value was documented with the VAXC product, we have
restored the original behavior.
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 VAXACRT01_071:
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 <lf> 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$search.
o Unlike Digital UNIX, the fsync(socket_id) call results in
an access violation instead of returning an EINVAL status.
o Opening and closing sockets does not properly release mutexes.
This problem which was introduced in OpenVMS V7.0 eventually
causes the mutex resources to be exhausted.
o Applications which call opendir and readdir recursively to traverse
subdirectories may end up in an infinite loop when reading the
directory that includes returning [000000]000000.DIR. The readdir
function no longer returns an entry which is equivalent to the
directory being read.
o OpenVMS V7.1 changed the behavior of the readdir function so
that it no longer retains the ".dir" extension when returning
a directory using the UNIX file syntax. Applications which
rely on this extension can now define a DECC$READDIR_KEEPDOTDIR
logical to restore this behavior.
o Beginning with OpenVMS V7.1, the DEC C Runtime Library does
not read the first record while opening the file if such
preloading will cause RMS to lock the record. Several users
have reported that images which used to work fine now fail.
The record preloading code has been modified to take these
user programs into account.
RELATED ARTICLES:
Detailed articles describing the problems listed above may exist in
the OPENVMS database. To view these articles, open the appropriate
product database and perform a query using either of the following
search strings: 'VAXACRT10_071', 'VAXCRTL' or 'VAXACRT'.
ECO KIT ORDERING INSTRUCTIONS:
If after an evaluation you wish to obtain this kit, request it
electronically using the appropriate Advanced Electronic Services
(AES) Service Tool. If you are not familiar with how to request
kits electronically, open the DIA, WIS or DSNLINK database and
review the article entitled:
[AES] How To Electronically Request ECO Kits Using Service Tools
INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS:
Install this kit with the VMSINSTAL utility by logging into the
SYSTEM account, and typing the following at the DCL prompt:
@SYS$UPDATE:VMSINSTAL VAXACRT10_071 [location of the saveset]
The saveset location may be a tape drive, CD, or a disk directory
that contains the kit saveset.
Since the images in this kit will not take effect until the system
is rebooted, you must reboot the system after installing this kit.
If you have other nodes in your OpenVMS cluster, they must also be
rebooted in order to make use of the new image(s). If it is not
possible or convenient to reboot the entire cluster at this time, a
rolling re-boot may be performed.
During installation you may see the following message:
%INSTALL-E-NODELSHRADR, unable to delete image with shareable address data
-INSTALL-I-PLSREBOOT, please reboot to install a new version of this image
This is not a cause for concern. It simply means that DECC$SHR.EXE
was installed as a resident image, which is the standard
configuration for OpenVMS VAX systems. The new image will not take
effect until the system is rebooted.
==========================================================================
| Table of Kit Image Information |
+----------------------------+----------+-----------------+--------------+
| | Overall | Image File | Image Link |
| Image Name | Checksum | Identification | Date/Time |
+----------------------------+----------+-----------------+--------------+
| DECC$SHR.EXE |%X0BB260CD| V7.1-005 | 9-MAY-2001 |
| | | 05:43:39.84 |
+----------------------------+----------+-----------------+--------------+
|
