[Openswan dev] [PATCH] Fix race condition between pluto start and whack

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Mattias Walstrom <lazzer at vmlinux.org>

| Fix race condition between pluto start and whack, which can result in 
| pluto becoming a zombie that never returns.

Do you really mean "zombie"?  A zombie is a process that has exited
but hasn't been reaped by its parent.  If pluto is running as a
daemon, init should reap it.

Are you running pluto with --nofork?

| When sending any whack message during the time pluto starts, whack will 
| just hang for a long time. And if pluto should die during this hang, it 
| will become a Zombie.

I don't understand this.  Why would a pending message cause Pluto to
become a Zombie?  This should not affect the ability of a parent
process (init or otherwise) to reap it.

| This patch makes sure that we do not open the ctl 
| socket until we actually can receive messages (all pluto initialization 
| is done).

The code has a comment explaining why the socket is created where it
is.  I no longer am certain, but I think the idea was that once a
startup script had executed "pluto", it was safe to assume that the
socket was created.  After your change, this is no longer true.