Avast on FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE

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1

Okay, so I installed avast, but for some strange reason I can’t get it to run at all on 4.9-STABLE. Any suggestions? Basically when I start up avast it just hangs. If I fire up truss to see where avast dies it hangs doing a bunch of these:

read(0x5,0xbfbff08b,0x1) = 1 (0x1)

I have to kill -9 the process for it to actually die.

Truss with avastd shows similar results, only the daemon actually dies nicely. The following looked relevant:
readlink(“/etc/malloc.conf”,0xbfbff4e8,63) ERR#2 ‘No such file or directory’
mmap(0x0,4096,0x3,0x1002,-1,0x0) = 674328576 (0x28317000)
break(0x805f000) = 0 (0x0)
break(0x8060000) = 0 (0x0)
break(0x8061000) = 0 (0x0)
break(0x8062000) = 0 (0x0)
__sysctl(0xbfbff5c4,0x2,0x28112720,0xbfbff5c0,0x0,0x0) = 0 (0x0)
mmap(0xbfaff000,4096,0x0,0x1000,-1,0x0) = -1078988800 (0xbfaff000)
break(0x8063000) = 0 (0x0)

…
read(0x5,0xbfbff097,0x1) = 1 (0x1)
fstat(5,0xbfbff00c) = 0 (0x0)
fcntl(0x5,0x3,0x0) = 4 (0x4)
fcntl(0x5,0x4,0x0) = 0 (0x0)
close(5) = 0 (0x0)
break(0x807d000) = 0 (0x0)
lstat(“/var/lib/avast4/400.vps”,0xbfbff354) = 0 (0x0)
stat(“/var/lib/avast4/400.vps”,0xbfbff39c) = 0 (0x0)
semsys(0x1,0x50005e95,0x3,0x7b6,0x28266048) ERR#28 ‘No space left on device’

Any ideas? Looks like the memory allocation is failing perhaps?

– steve

2

Any word from the powers that be on this? Still no luck in getting Avast to run on FreeBSD. :confused:

3

Well, I believe I’ve figured out the source of the problem. This particular system was running out of semaphores. The default FreeBSD semaphore limit appears to be very low (10).

Two workarounds for it might include:

  • tweaking the kernel parameter to increase the semaphore limit (kern.ipc.semmni I believe)
  • turning off other processes that are using the semaphores

You can monitor your semaphore usage with ‘ipcs’. Unfortunately tweaking the kernel parameter requires a reboot, so I opted for the latter. The program now appears to be working for me.

Anyways, I hope this is helpful for you for future referece ;). If you find anything else out that might help I’d love to hear it.

4

Thanks a lot for your insights. We really didn’t have a clue about this one. :wink: :slight_smile:

thanks again,
Vlk