DCL V4.0 ECO Kit for VSI OpenVMS Alpha

Problem Description

After using SET COMMAND to add a command to your process command table or a command table file, certain malformed commands may later cause a process crash in DCL.

The tests DCL performs to validate the command structures had an error that resulted in a corruption of internal process memory when checking the malformed command. This would then result in a process crash.

DCL has been corrected to gracefully handle malformed command table entries.

Images and/or Files Affected

[SYSEXE]DCL.EXE

Quix and/or Bugzilla Cases Reporting This Problem

VSI Internal Bugzilla 1090

Release Version of VSI OpenVMS That Will Contain This Change

Next VSI OpenVMS Alpha release after V8.4-2L2

Problem Description

Malformed commands used as input for SET COMMAND may cause a subsequent process crash from DCL by producing a malformed command table. In addition, some malformed input to SET COMMAND may cause an image crash within CDU.EXE while building the command tables for use by DCL.

Several missing limit checks were incorrectly allowing broken command tables to be produced. There was no problem with correctly defined commands, but building the malformed commands could cause an access violation in CDU or a subsequent process crash.

The checks have been corrected so that valid tables are created or appropriate errors are returned. In particular, the documented limit of 255 qualifiers per VERB or SYNTAX statement is now enforced. In addition, SET COMMAND will now correctly reject a zero-byte file supplied through the /TABLE qualifier.

Images and/or Files Affected

[SYSEXE]CDU.EXE

Quix and/or Bugzilla Cases Reporting This Problem

VSI Internal Bugzilla 1088

Release Version of VSI OpenVMS That Will Contain This Change

Next VSI OpenVMS Alpha release after V8.4-2L2

Problem Description

For a loaded license with a version number which is less than 7.1, but not zero, F$LICENSE("pak-name","producer") returns FALSE. For loaded licenses with version number 7.1 or higher, or 0.0 (no version number), F$LICENSE correctly returns TRUE.

SHOW LICENSE correctly shows all these licenses as loaded.

The behavior of F$LICENSE has been corrected to return TRUE for all validly loaded licenses regardless of version number.

Images and/or Files Affected

[SYSEXE]DCL.EXE

Quix and/or Bugzilla Cases Reporting This Problem

VSI Internal Bugzilla 995

Release Version of VSI OpenVMS That Will Contain This Change

Next VSI OpenVMS Alpha release after V8.4-2L2

Problem Description

After using RECALL/INPUT to load the recall buffer, a subsequent RECALL/ALL command may cause a process crash resulting in a display similar to the following and then the process is deleted:

Improperly handled condition, bad stack or no handler specified.
  Signal arguments:   Number = 0000000000000005
                      Name   = 000000000000000C
                               0000000000000000
                               000000007FFC9CD1
                               000000007AF8AFA8
                               0000000000000012

For this problem to occur, the input file must be constructed with embedded NUL characters, which is not a valid command syntax.

With this fix, DCL interprets the first NUL character as the terminator of the input line during a RECALL/INPUT command and does not fail during RECALL/ALL.

Images and/or Files Affected

[SYSEXE]DCL.EXE

Quix and/or Bugzilla Cases Reporting This Problem

VSI Internal Bugzilla 1054

Release Version of VSI OpenVMS That Will Contain This Change

Next VSI OpenVMS Alpha release after V8.4-2L2

Workaround

Verify that any command line supplied to RECALL/INPUT does not contain any NUL characters.

Problem Description

The VSI OpenVMS Alpha DCL V1.0 ECO kits included a change to work around an error in the behavior of F$SEARCH when using the % character as a wildcard but encountering file names which actually included the % character. This would result in the search operation not finding some files. The description of this change was inadvertently omitted in the DCL V1.0 ECO kit release notes.

An unfortunate side effect of this attempted workaround caused RMS to consume more resources than previously when performing F$SEARCH, which could lead to this error:

%RMS-F-DME, dynamic memory exhausted

The underlying search issue is actually a bug which is now corrected with the VSI OpenVMS Alpha RMS V3.0 ECO kits.

The DCL V2.0 ECO kits remove the workaround code changed in the DCL V1.0 kit, which results in DCL no longer consuming additional resources for F$SEARCH.

Images and/or Files Affected

[SYSEXE]DCL.EXE

Quix and/or Bugzilla Cases Reporting This Problem

• QXCM1001487902
• VSI Bugzilla 1736

Release Version of VSI OpenVMS That Will Contain This Change

Next VSI OpenVMS Alpha release after V8.4-2L2

Workaround

The initial change in the DCL V1.0 ECO kit resulted in RMS consuming additional resources for each open context stream when using F$SEARCH. This is the cause of the spurious RMS-F-DME errors. If any of your DCL procedures use a large number of simultaneous search contexts, it may be possible to alleviate the symptom by increasing the system parameter PIOPAGES.

PIOPAGES is dynamic and any subsequent processes will pick up the new value on login.

Problem Description

Command Language Definition (CLD) files with exceptionally long token names may cause the CDU parser to overwrite internal structures, causing the program to abort with an access violation.

This problem has been corrected.

Images and/or Files Affected

[SYSEXE]CDU.EXE

Quix and/or Bugzilla Cases Reporting This Problem

VSI Internal Bugzilla 1197

Release Version of VSI OpenVMS That Will Contain This Change

Next VSI OpenVMS Alpha release after V8.4-2L2

Problem Description

DCL expression parsing, concatenation, and string reduction (e.g., string1 − string2) involving DCL symbols that resolve to long strings may cause a process crash.

DCL expressions containing long string elements may cause DCL to overrun the supervisor-mode stack resulting in a process crash.

The crash footprint will resemble:

Improperly handled condition, bad stack or no handler specified.
  Signal arguments:   Number = 0000000000000005
                      Name   = 000000000000000C
                               0000000000000004
                               000000007FF8BFFC
                               000000007ADDA300
                               0000000000000012

After displaying the condition information the process will be terminated.

For technical reasons, the effective size of the supervisor-mode stack is smaller on IA-64 systems than on Alpha, causing this problem to occur more often.

With this ECO kit, calculations which would cause a stack overflow now return a warning:

%DCL-W-BUFOVF, command buffer overflow - shorten expression
               or command line

Images and/or Files Affected

[SYSEXE]DCL.EXE

VSI Case Identifier

Bugzilla 3406

Release Version of VSI OpenVMS That Will Contain This Change

Next VSI OpenVMS Alpha release after V8.4-2L2

Problem Description

A DCL command procedure with certain syntax errors may result in a supervisor mode DOUBLEDEALO bugcheck, resulting in the deletion of the executing process.

This issue is corrected with this ECO kit.

Images and/or Files Affected

[SYSEXE]DCL.EXE

VSI Case Identifier

Jiras SPS-1428, SPS-1429, BO-1541

Release Version of VSI OpenVMS That Will Contain This Change

Next VSI OpenVMS IA-64 release after V8.4-2L3