[Pdns-users] See weird PowerDNS crashes? Don't compile with gcc 2.95, or try current svn version

[bert hubert]

Hi PowerPeople,

I've been investigating several reports of PowerDNS crashes lately, it turns
out they were all from binaries compiled with gcc 2.95.x, and all about in
the same place that had to do with threads and strings. These crashes
happened on FreeBSD and Linux.

I've since replaced the offending line in a way that has previously solved
problems with gcc 2.95 on OpenBSD, but all this has not given me a great
feeling about this version of gcc and PowerDNS. This change is not a bugfix,
but simply splits up a line in two steps
(http://wiki.powerdns.com/projects/trac/changeset/290)

If you see odd crashes, AND you have a version you know was compiled with
gcc 2.95.x (none of the versions on our webpage are), you can do two things:

	1) compile the most recent version from svn, which I've helpfully
uploaded as a tarfile on http://ds9a.nl/pdns/pdns-2.9.18-cvs.tar.gz (the
name is silly, I know).

	2) recompile pdns-2.9.17 using a newer compiler

Notably, the version on the page of Christof Meerwald
(http://cmeerw.org/debian/) has been known to cause problems. Christof has
been kind enough to include a notice to that effect on his page.

Also, I've added a #warning statement to the powerdns source that makes
compiling with older versions issue a warning. Also, PowerDNS will from now
on report the compiler used to compile with when asked with --version, and
on startup.

Unless I get reports of 2.95 bugs disappearing with the latest version, I
will declare older versions of gcc as unsafe for PowerDNS. 

Please let me know your experiences. Also let me know about any other
crashes you see of course!

	Bert

-- 
http://www.PowerDNS.com      Open source, database driven DNS Software 
http://netherlabs.nl              Open and Closed source services