>but I don't have enough experience to know what the _significant_ differences are.
I already told you, linker/dld patches.
You do have PHSS_37947. Machine2 seems to have this old patch PHSS_34353.
(But this is besides Patrick's point, the party line is if one fails, you make it like the other. :-)
>Perhaps you missed my point. This is a 3rd party library, downloaded to each machine from the vendor, and chatr gives different results.
I don't see how, I told you exactly what patches to check. And I mentioned that the different chatr results are not important for 2 reasons, only that there are differences.
>The reason for using "cksum" is to discover, during install, if the library had been altered.
Exactly and that goes to what I said. I was the proximal cause of the change to chatr, JAGag09149 in PHSS_34852.
>The development guru for the product seems pretty certain that -z provides the functionality needed.
I'm not sure how? -z detects sloppiness. It won't fix things.
>It's just that each HP-UX has a different understanding of the library behaviour.
Not really, just better wording.
>Can you explain why that makes a difference? Only chatr (and ultimately the execution stack) treats this binary library differently.
dld is the software that handles shlibs and process start/exit. So, dld has everything to do with the execution.
>The message is from chatr, not the linker.
The N inferences are that if chatr changes so does dld.
>but it causes the software that uses it to create zombies on shutdown.
You haven't explained how it fails and there may be NO connection with -z and the abort. There are plenty of ways dld can hose you over.
>Everything looks normal, except the process doesn't actually come down.
If you see no signals, this it is likely unrelated.
>kill -9 pid does not remove the process, nor can we get rid of the zombie.
You get rid of zombies by killing the zombie master.
>I'm suspicious that of the suggestion that this is merely a difference in message format.
Why?? That's exactly what JAGag09149 did. Also that difference means that dld is different.
>All of this is during shutdown of the process.
dld has had problems in this area.
>What is the mechanism for trapping null pointer dereferences?
Hardware R/W protection on page 0.
>Should I be instructing the customer to use: chatr -Z library.so
I said that was useless, it is effective only on the executable.
>-z one is used a compile time, the other at execution.
No, one is used at link time, the other post link.
>I don't know if the compiler builds in special code for handling null pointers
Why? That's what the hardware is for.
>So perhaps I should be instructing the user to use: chatr -z executable_name
That may catch a problem earlier. But your major point is that everything is the same except the patches installed.
