freebsd stable - Sep 2006 - large system date skew on RELENG_6 changes causes select() failures

Hello,

A while ago, by accident, I've changed the system date back to the '98
using date(1). To my astonishment, screen(1) barfed about EINVAL in
select() and died. Programs, including opera (native FreeBSD-6 binary)
kept spinning the CPU until I killed them.

I have no means for debugging it.

Is this somehow expected? If not (i.e. it's a bug), is it known?

Stanislaw Halik wrote this message on Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 06:51
+0200:
> Hello,
> 
> A while ago, by accident, I've changed the system date back to the
'98
> using date(1). To my astonishment, screen(1) barfed about EINVAL in
> select() and died. Programs, including opera (native FreeBSD-6 binary)
> kept spinning the CPU until I killed them.
> 
> I have no means for debugging it.
> 
> Is this somehow expected? If not (i.e. it's a bug), is it known?
Probably, they calculated timeout's which magicly became negative, which
isn't a valid timeout, and none of the programs are programmed well enough
to handle the case and exhibited the behavior that you saw...

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."