RMS V3.1 ECO Patch Kit for VSI OpenVMS IA-64

If a process owns a lock on a file system resource and another process attempts to acquire an incompatible lock on the same resource, then a blocking AST is delivered to the owning process so it may lower the lock mode to allow the new process to continue.

Under normal circumstances, this happens automatically and the processes will make progress with the locks and file access as needed.

A process in RWMBX resource wait state could own file system locks on files while it is trying to read or write to a mailbox. Should a new process request a lock in this case, the owning process was unable to drop its lock mode since the process could not continue until the resource wait state was satisfied.

To prevent a potential hang, the blocking AST routine has been modified to directly lower the lock mode rather than wait until the RWMBX state clears.

This behavior was discovered by a customer using PIPE to invoke the AUTHORIZE utility as a step in its piped commands. Since each step in the pipe creates a new sub-process and uses mailboxes for communication, it was possible for the PIPE command to cause the process to block against itself. As this entailed a file lock on the system authorization file (SYSUAF), eventually it would cause a system hang for new processes or any other processes trying to access the file.

This behavior is corrected with this patch kit.

• [SYS$LDR]RMS.EXE
• [SYS$LDR]RMS.STB

• Jira CLUS-38, BO-1900
• Netsuite NS7556

Next VSI OpenVMS for Integrity Servers release after V8.4-2L3.

A customer site experienced periodic RMS bugchecks with RMS Global Buffers enabled on RIGHTSLIST.DAT and SYSUAF.DAT. This would result in the process that incurred the exception being deleted with the following message:

%RMS-F-BUG, fatal RMS condition (FFFFFFC0), process deleted

The corresponds to the error BADGBH, Bad Global Buffer Header found when the RMS Global Buffer is used for opening a file.

After this error occurred, they could no longer log in and a reboot was required to clear the issue.

This fix addresses a small timing window between instructions if a regular file close (or image rundown) is interrupted by a last chance abort rundown.

• [SYS$LDR]RMS.EXE
• [SYS$LDR]RMS.STB

• VSI Bugzilla 212
• QXCM1001459710

VSI OpenVMS for Integrity Servers V8.4-2L1.

A structure used during RMS name processing is built dynamically on the stack. The base structure definition assumed this would always be quadword aligned, however the stack may only be longword aligned. By enforcing only longword alignment for this structure, the proper instructions are generated to access it without alignment faults, and with no additional instruction overhead.

The routines using this structure are accessed repeatedly during RMS Recovery Unit Journal processing. Other RMS operations may also incur these alignment faults depending on your workload.

This patch kit removes these RMS alignment faults, yielding much improved system performance for these operations.

• [SYS$LDR]RMS.EXE
• [SYS$LDR]RMS.STB

• VSI Bugzilla 192
• VSI Internal Bugzilla 350
• PTR 75-74-440

VSI OpenVMS for Integrity Servers V8.4-2L1.

On very rare occasions, when multiple processes are performing directory deletion or renaming operations on the same volume simultaneously, a process may not update the RMS directory cache regularly. This can lead to unexpected behavior, as in this example:

$ RENAME/LOG  DATA1:[TEMP.DIR2]B.DIR  A.DIR
%RENAME-I-RENAMED, DATA1:[TEMP.DIR2]B.DIR;1 renamed to DATA1:[TEMP.DIR2]A.DIR;1
$ CREATE/DIRECTORY/LOG  DATA1:[TEMP.DIR2.B]
%CREATE-I-EXISTS, DATA1:[TEMP.DIR2.B] already exists

In this example, the CREATE command incorrectly reports that directory B already exists, even though that directory was successfully renamed to A in the preceding command.

This patch kit fixes this issue.

• [SYS$LDR]RMS.EXE
• [SYS$LDR]RMS.STB

QXCM1001463273

VSI OpenVMS for Integrity Servers V8.4-2L3.

Under certain conditions, wildcard file searches may stop short if file names contain the % character.

In an environment where extended file names are in use, certain wildcard searches may fail as follows:

This issue was due to internal file name conversions required during the search which did not correctly interpret the wildcard character in all cases.

This patch kit fixes this issue.

• [SYS$LDR]RMS.EXE
• [SYS$LDR]RMS.STB

• QXCM1001487902
• VSI Bugzilla 253
• VSI Internal Bugzilla 742

VSI OpenVMS for Integrity Servers V8.4-2L3.