threading and linux (2.6.

[Evan Hunt]

> [Jack Tavares]  So, for bind 9.6.x and 9.7.0 is the recommendation to run
> nonthreaded?

No, not at all.  Threaded works fine--I use it myself.  It's just a little
touchy about file permissions.  On linux, I'm given to understand, a
multi-threaded application can't relinquish its root privileges and then
get them back later if it needs to open a file--which named currently
assumes it will be able to do.  So if things aren't set up quite right,
a threaded linux build of named can fail to open the pidfile or the session
key file or something, and exit during startup.  Since that's likely to be
a confusing sort of error for a naive user to cope with, the default build
configuration dodges the problem, by building single-threaded.

We do have a plan for fixing the underlying problem, and after we've done
that, we'll make --enable-threads the default on linux too.

In the meantime, as long as you're prepared to watch out for errors of this
type and correct them with judicious use of rm, chown, or named -u, you're
fine.

-- 
Evan Hunt -- each at isc.org
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.