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From: Eric Blake <ebb9 AT byu DOT net>
Subject:  Re: Possible BSOD from getcwd on WinXP SP3
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:57:46 +0000 (UTC)
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Henson, George A CTR USA MEDCOM JMLFDC <George.Henson <at> amedd.army.mil> 
writes:

> 
> Hello,
> 
> Building tar seems to trigger a Blue Screen Of Death on WinXP.

Rather, it is triggering a bug in your ntfs.sys driver.  Cygwin is a user app, 
and as such, cannot cause a BSOD.  Only drivers can do that.

> The only information I have been able to get out of the Windows crash
> dumps is the fault happens somewhere in the ntfs.sys driver.

Report this to whoever provided the driver.  Meanwhile, you can work around it 
via:

./configure gl_cv_func_getcwd_path_max=yes

to prime the cache and skip that check (I do that anyways on my XP machine, in 
my /usr/local/share/config.site file, not because my driver is buggy, but 
because Microsoft has acknowledged that XP has quadratic handling of long path 
names, and that Vista or newer have linear handling; the quadratic handling 
makes the test spin for minutes at 100% CPU utilization, attributable to system 
call churn rather than application action).  Also, that check is repeated among 
tar, coreutils, findutils, and a few other GNU packages.

And for the record, I've also noticed that sysinternal's procexp can crash the 
system when trying to examine the run of that particular conftest.exe with very 
deep hierarchies.

-- 
Eric Blake
volunteer cygwin tar maintainer



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