can't finish update: dpkg hangs installing xulrunner

[Michael Shiloh]

On 05/08/2011 08:10 PM, guy keren wrote:
> On Sun, 2011-05-08 at 17:04 -0700, Michael Shiloh wrote:
>> apt-get update hangs at
>>
>> 	Setting up xulrunner-1.9.1
>>
>> I can kill this, but then I can't finish the update because it says that
>> dpkg was interrupted. Trying to let dpkg repair with
>>
>> 	sudo dpkg --configure -a
>>
>> hangs setting up xulrunner so I'm stuck.
>>
>> Any ideas?
>
> what does strace tell you?
>
> i.e. run the program under 'strace -f -o /tmp/somefile.txt dpkg ...'
>
> and when it hangs - look in the file /tmp/somefile.txt, and see what is
> it waiting for.

Good idea. I'm not quite sure how to understand the results. The file 
starts with:

10208 execve("/usr/bin/dpkg", ["dpkg", "--configure", "-a"], [/* 20 vars 
*/]) = 0


and ends with:

10227 set_robust_list(0xb775e900, 0xc)  = 0
10227 futex(0xbfd66510, FUTEX_WAKE_PRIVATE, 1) = 0
10227 futex(0xbfd66510, FUTEX_WAIT_BITSET_PRIVATE|FUTEX_CLOCK_REALTIME, 
1, NULL, bfd66520) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
10227 rt_sigaction(SIGRTMIN, {0x3196e0, [], SA_SIGINFO}, NULL, 8) = 0
10227 rt_sigaction(SIGRT_1, {0x319760, [], SA_RESTART|SA_SIGINFO}, NULL, 
8) = 0
10227 rt_sigprocmask(SIG_UNBLOCK, [RTMIN RT_1], NULL, 8) = 0
10227 getrlimit(RLIMIT_STACK, {rlim_cur=8192*1024, 
rlim_max=RLIM_INFINITY}) = 0
10227 uname({sys="Linux", node="t60", ...}) = 0
10227 statfs64("/selinux", 84, {f_type="EXT2_SUPER_MAGIC", f_bsize=4096, 
f_blocks=27662569, f_bfree=5190843, f_bavail=3785658, f_files=14057472, 
f_ffree=13425663, f_fsid={-1774502679, 1875976236}, f_namelen=255, 
f_frsize=4096}) = 0
10227 open("/proc/cpuinfo", O_RDONLY)   = 3
10227 read(3, "processor\t: 0\nvendor_id\t: Genuin"..., 1024) = 1024
10227 read(3, " no\nfpu\t\t: yes\nfpu_exception\t: y"..., 1024) = 382
10227 read(3, "", 1024)                 = 0
10227 close(3)                          = 0
10227 readlink("/etc/malloc.conf", 0xbfd64fab, 4096) = -1 ENOENT (No 
such file or directory)
10227 mmap2(NULL, 1048576, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, 
MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb765d000
10227 futex(0xb775e890, FUTEX_WAIT_PRIVATE, 2, NULL


and that's the last line. It's been stucke there for awhile and no new 
lines are added to the file, so it looks like that futex is what's 
blocking. But why and what that means I don't know.

What do you think?