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Running a (statically) compiled program in an environment where /usr/lib/locale or /usr/lib/gconv (or ../lib64/..) are not there, causes it to hog the CPU and rapidly allocate memory (this happens for example in an empty chroot).

Steps to reproduce:

echo "main = return ()" > test.hs
ghc -static -optl-static -optl-pthread -o test test.hs
chroot `pwd` /test

Strace output:

$ /strace -e trace=file -e signal= /test
execve("/test", ["/test"], [/* 17 vars */]) = 0
open("/usr/lib64/locale/locale-archive", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/share/locale/locale.alias", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib64/locale/de_DE.UTF-8/LC_CTYPE", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib64/locale/de_DE.utf8/LC_CTYPE", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib64/locale/de_DE/LC_CTYPE", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib64/locale/de.UTF-8/LC_CTYPE", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib64/locale/de.utf8/LC_CTYPE", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib64/locale/de/LC_CTYPE", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib64/gconv/gconv-modules.cache", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib64/gconv/gconv-modules", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

Strace output (with LC_ALL=C):

$ LC_ALL=C strace -e trace=file -e signal= /test
execve("/test", ["/test"], [/* 18 vars */]) = 0
open("/usr/lib64/gconv/gconv-modules.cache", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib64/gconv/gconv-modules", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

In both cases, there are no further system calls (apart from timer ticks and mmap).

I was also able to reproduce this behavior without a chroot, by replacing the paths from strace's output with something nonexistent in the binary (manually, with a hex-editor). I didn't try dynamically linked binaries, yet.

One problem may be, that iconv_open constantly returns -1 if it doesn't find the files listed above.

Trac metadata

Trac field	Value
Version	7.6.2
Type	Bug
TypeOfFailure	OtherFailure
Priority	normal
Resolution	Unresolved
Component	None
Test case
Differential revisions
BlockedBy
Related
Blocking
CC
Operating system	Linux
Architecture