[CentOS-devel] glibc internal ABI changes and CentOS 8 Stream updates on busy systems

Fri Aug 26 14:19:17 UTC 2022
Florian Weimer <fweimer at redhat.com>

We have recently been made aware that the internal ABI changes due to
LD_AUDIT fixes cause processes launched concurrently during the update
to crash:

  glibc: Upgrading to glibc-2.28-209.el8.x86_64 causes segfaults during
  concurrent process launch
  <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2119304>

In glibc-2.28-211.el8, we have made the ABI changes more compatible with
*older* versions (before -208), but this might cause yet another bumpy
update from -209 or -210 to -211 or later.  (The version ranges are
slightly different for s390x; see the bug.  ppc64le has a different
issue caused by RPM file writing order, but no crashes.)

CentOS 9 Stream should be less sensitive to these issues due to the
merged libpthread/libdl.

We are putting some checks into place to catch this earlier.  In
general, it might not be possible to avoid such issues completely,
particularly on CentOS 8 Stream.  The workaround is to do updates in
quasi-single-user mode, with as little running on the system as
possible.

Thanks,
Florian