Arch Linux

lomov_vl

Member

From: Russia, Irkutsk

Registered: 2010-01-20

Posts: 34

Website

[INVALID] [pacman] error: call to waitpid failed (No child process)

Hi.

First of all I apologize for very unclear topic name but this problem clutter me.

Description:

I use Archlinux x86_64 on my several machines: two laptops and desktop. On desktop and one laptop I update system regularly and also use my custom builds of git, bzr, emacs, rxvt, tmux and others.

Preliminary:

After Sat update (2010-04-24) on my desktop I noticed that compiled Emacs (source taken from bzr repo) crashed just after start. I found the cause of error: new gcc (4.5.0) has broken '-O2' option (actually broken '-foptimize-sibling-calls' but accidentally '-O3' option works). Besides this annoyance my desktop system works fine.

Main problem:

But on my laptop (on which I traced down the problem with compiled Emacs) I faced with strange problems (I report about them only now because I didn't have time before).

When I run 'sudo pacman -Su' to update my laptop system I sometimes see

error: call to waitpid failed (No child process)

I figured out that this message comes only if 'chrooting' is performed (pacman --debug).

Also when I try to update local git repositories using 'git pull' I get the same error:

error: waitpid for git-pull failed: No child process

and the same for 'gc', 'rev-list', 'git-remote-http'. (I checked with newly compiled binary and distro's binary).

Even simple python script 'sample.py' fails to run:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os,string

target = "sample.py"

f = os.popen('file "%s" 2> /dev/null' % target)
output = string.strip(f.read())
rc = f.close()
if not output or rc:
    print("Some error occurs")
else:
    print("Result %s" % output)

If I run it I get

IOError: [Errno 10] No child process

Except these error messages my laptop system works without noticeable errors.

Could someone help me trace down the problem?

P.S. I use zen kernel on this laptop (AUR: kernel26zen-git, stable) but I also checked this behavior on default kernel.

EDIT:
Sorry. My fault. Seems that this error is triggered by tmux . I tried git in sakura and didn't see any error messages.
Sorry for the noise.

EDIT2:
For those who are interested in solution for this problem with tmux I found a thread about this behavior on sourceforge.net:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/foru … tmux-users

Last edited by lomov_vl (2010-04-30 06:56:22)