re: NOTIFICATION - News Release

2006-01-14 Thread Harriot Benson
After announcing they cleaned $1,000,000.00 worth 
of debt off their books, investors start rally !!
**INVESTOR WATCH ISSUED FOR TUESDAY 17th, BIG MOVE COULD HAPPEN**

SYMBOL: MWIS.OB 
Friday Close: $0.165 
Friday Volume: 120,000 
Short Term: $0.50 - $0.75 
Long Term: $1.50 - $1.75 

With Volume up and the forward movement of this great company, 
we believe we will see HUGE increase in price tuesday. 
Get your buy in first thing and get what you can before it climbs. 

Be sure you read the release below and comments from the Diector 
of Syntek Capital, then, get on MWIS first thing Tuesday Morning! 


Past Venture Capital Investor Agreed to Waive Old Debt in Exchange 
for Restricted Shares 
Jan 9, 2006 8:14:00 AM 

m-Wise, Inc. (OTCBB:MWIS), a leading technology provider 
of mobile content solutions for operators, ASPs and content providers, 
today announced that venture capital firm Syntek Capital, A.G. 
has entered into a termination and release agreement converting 
$1 million of debt to m-Wise common stock. 

Under the terms of the agreement, m-Wise will issue a minimum 
of 5,561,994 shares of common stock in exchange for terminating m-Wise's 
3.5 year-old debt to Syntek Capital. The conversion of this debt 
was for restricted shares at market value with no discount relative 
to the 30 days average trading price of the common stock. 

Furthermore, m-Wise will issue Syntek a warrant of 5,263,158 shares 
of common stock at an exercise price of $0.19 per share, which can be 
exercised for up to a period of three years. 

Shay Ben-Asulin, chairman of m-Wise said, "We are very happy that
a strategic investor like Syntek Capital saw the opportunity 
in our current stock price and took a long-term position in m-Wise. 
The management of m-Wise believes that increasing our shareholder's equity, 
coupled with completing several business transactions shortly, 
will result in excellent return to Syntek and all our shareholders." 

Ronni Benatoff, director of Syntek Capital said, "We are pleased 
to begin the New Year confirming our support to m-Wise. Syntek Capital 
has a strategy to investing only in companies with solid core 
and sustainable businesses. We have long recognized the potential 
of m-Wise's technology and believe in its future growth potential." 


..Whatever you do WATCH MWIS...




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RE: stat(2) triggers on-demand virus scan

2006-01-14 Thread Hannu E K Nevalainen
pmcferrin wrote:
> The stat(2) system call runs very slowly because it is constantlt
> triggering the McAfee on-demand virus scanner to scan the file that
> is being stat'ed. This may not seem like a big thing but I frequently
> stat thousands of files at a batch.  I find that the stat runs much
> faster when I temporarily disable the on-demand virus scanner.

Judging from previous messages on this list it *seems* that one of the
slowest
things you can do in cygwin is accessing files; stat(), fopen() and the
like.


In general...
FWIW/IMO; If you have the option to replace M*Af**[1] with a just as good an
AV, then do
that - I suggest to avoid Sym*ntec[2] products too as they seem to have
similar problems.

OTOH, I have good experience with what you find at f-secure dot com - I've
had this one
installed since cygwin 1.3.x was current, and prior to that.

I've always considered S. and M. AV's to be CPU hogs in general terms - and
have found f-secure to be much lighter in this respect. Now I wonder how M.
and S. AV's compare to what I have done in a simple (attached) comparasion
with fsecure V5.30 ON/OFF
(Use e.g. NOTEPAD, and a monospace font to view it)

/H

[1] I've got previous experience with having it on my private PC.
[2] I'm forced to live with such a thing at work.
--
Test object:
 Windows partition with some additional SW installed
 Included on this disk is a huge cygwin installation.

 Test run several times prior taking these samples.
Also making sure it ran without interference from other
running software
 - this was to ensure somewhat persistent timings.

AV ON   AV OFF

find =prints=> 201195 (files+dirs)

real30.089  28.165  27.875  real27.547  28.113  27.988
user 5.576   5.498   5.779  user 5.529   5.732   5.451
sys 23.966  22.123  21.638  sys 21.562  21.842  21.874

find - per file/dir, microseconds calculated from the above file/dir count
150 140 139 137 140 139


du -s =prints=> 7431252

real87.608  88.285  87.523  real43.355  41.916  41.815
user 8.155   8.037.89   user 7.358   8.015   7.624 
sys 77.156  77.905  77.734  sys 33.531  32.062  32.312

du - per file/dir, microseconds calculated from the above file/dir count
435 439 435 215 208 208


>From this it seems that "du" does something that triggers the f-secure AV
in some way (AV doing the same as "du"?).
 This has the impact of doubling the scan time per file/dir.


It would be interesting to see similar measurements done with McAFee and
Symantec antivirus packages.



-- actual test session log follows --

$ cd W:  # Sempron 2800+, 1G RAM - has Win2K and related files on W: 

 --- AV enabled --
$ for (( i=0; i<3 ;i++ )) ;do time find 2>/dev/null -printf "%f\n" | wc -l ;done
201195

real0m30.089s
user0m5.576s
sys 0m23.966s
201195

real0m28.165s
user0m5.498s
sys 0m22.123s
201195

real0m27.875s
user0m5.779s
sys 0m21.638s
201195

-- AV disabled --
$ for (( i=0; i<3 ;i++ )) ;do time find 2>/dev/null -printf "%f\n" | wc -l ;done
201195

real0m27.547s
user0m5.529s
sys 0m21.562s
201195

real0m28.113s
user0m5.732s
sys 0m21.842s
201195

real0m27.988s
user0m5.451s
sys 0m21.874s
201195

$ for (( i=0; i<3 ;i++ )) ;do time du -s 2>/dev/null ;done
7431252 .

real0m43.355s
user0m7.358s
sys 0m33.531s
7431252 .

real0m41.916s
user0m8.015s
sys 0m32.062s
7431252 .

real0m41.815s
user0m7.624s
sys 0m32.312s
7431252 .

-- AV enabled --
$ for (( i=0; i<3 ;i++ )) ;do time du -s 2>/dev/null ;done
7431252 .

real1m27.608s
user0m8.155s
sys 1m17.156s
7431252 .

real1m28.285s
user0m8.030s
sys 1m17.905s
7431252 .

real1m27.523s
user0m7.890s
sys 1m17.734s
7431252 .

$ uname -a
CYGWIN_NT-5.0 amd 1.5.19s(0.149/4/2) 20051229 16:10:48 i686 unknown unknown 
Cygwin


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RE: stat(2) triggers on-demand virus scan

2006-01-14 Thread Brett Serkez
> > The stat(2) system call runs very slowly because it is constantlt
> > triggering the McAfee on-demand virus scanner to scan the file that
> > is being stat'ed. This may not seem like a big thing but I
> > frequently stat thousands of files at a batch.  I find that the stat
> > runs much faster when I temporarily disable the on-demand virus
> > scanner.
>
> Judging from previous messages on this list it *seems* that one of the
> slowest things you can do in cygwin is accessing files; stat(),
> fopen() and the like.
>
>
> In general... FWIW/IMO; If you have the option to replace M*Af**[1]
> with a just as good an AV, then do that - I suggest to avoid
> Sym*ntec[2] products too as they seem to have similar problems.

I've reported similar issues with ZoneAlarm and its on-demand scanning.
This is the price that is paid on WinDoze for a generally less sure
environment and having to compensate with such tools.

That being said, I don't believe its reasonable to just give up or
constrain one's self to particular security products as a work around,
although their may be other reasons.  The choice of a given firewall or
security tool may not be an option, should this prohibit one from using
cygwin effectively in any given environment?

I'm still researching, I was going to respond this is posting at a
later time with more insight, but before things get out-of-hand, I
wanted to jump in.  I suppose I'm still hopeful that we can zero in
on what precisely is causing the on-demand scanners to consume so
much CPU. Since Windows programs don't trigger the same level of
response (or atleast they don't appear to) their must be some change
that can be made.

I've started to notice that even on one system that I have that is
relatively isolated, and not encumbered with security software, bash,
ssh, sh and other programs seems to consume an inordinate amount of CPU.

This thread points to stat, I've been looking at process creation,
perhaps it is a bit of both.  WinDoze systems tend to create monolithic
programs, where as UNIX/Linux/POSIX tend to create lots of small
programs and invoke them often, which inherently causes more file
accesses and process creation.  I suspect their are multiple issues, I
also suspect they can eventually be addressed.

Brett

Brett C. Serkez, Techie


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Re: stat(2) triggers on-demand virus scan

2006-01-14 Thread Christopher Faylor
On Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 03:35:17PM -0500, Brett Serkez wrote:
>I'm still researching, I was going to respond this is posting at a
>later time with more insight, but before things get out-of-hand, I
>wanted to jump in.  I suppose I'm still hopeful that we can zero in
>on what precisely is causing the on-demand scanners to consume so
>much CPU. Since Windows programs don't trigger the same level of
>response (or atleast they don't appear to) their must be some change
>that can be made.

I just wanted to make it clear that we aren't going to be making any
special concessions to a product like a virus scanner which cause perfectly
acceptable code to misbehave.  If that is the case then it is a situation
for the virus scanner to work out.  It's not a requirement that cygwin
work around things like this.

Maybe this is a given but I thought I'd just make it clear.

>I've started to notice that even on one system that I have that is
>relatively isolated, and not encumbered with security software, bash,
>ssh, sh and other programs seems to consume an inordinate amount of CPU.

Try setting CYGWIN=noinordinate .

cgf

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Re: stat(2) triggers on-demand virus scan

2006-01-14 Thread Brett Serkez
> On Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 03:35:17PM -0500, Brett Serkez wrote:
> >I'm still researching, I was going to respond this is posting at a
> >later time with more insight, but before things get out-of-hand, I
> >wanted to jump in.  I suppose I'm still hopeful that we can zero in
> >on what precisely is causing the on-demand scanners to consume so
> >much CPU. Since Windows programs don't trigger the same level of
> >response (or atleast they don't appear to) their must be some change
> >that can be made.
>
> I just wanted to make it clear that we aren't going to be making any
> special concessions to a product like a virus scanner which cause
> perfectly acceptable code to misbehave.  If that is the case then it
> is a situation for the virus scanner to work out.  It's not a
> requirement that cygwin work around things like this.

Well, that is a pretty strong statement, I'd expect from a for-profit
company run by corporate management.  ZoneLabs offical stance is that
they don't support emulated environments.  Humm...  So if neither are
willing to change, then what?  I don't know Symantec's or McAfee's
offical stance.

As far as coding being 'perfectly acceptable', that is a matter of
point-of-
view.  If it causes such behavior, is it acceptable?

While I respect the purist point of view, one I've held over the years,
seems that we need to be practical sometimes.  Are you saying that if
the problem could be isolated, and reasonable changes proposed, you
wouldn't make/allow them?  Do we want IT administrators to utilize
Cygwin to integrate with the Linux/UNIX environment?  If this means not
being able to effectively use Cygwin if they are also required to run
ZoneAlarm, Norton, McAfee, what choice do you think they'll make, or
more precisely, their management will make on their behalf?

Since we ultimately don't know the root cause, this discussion is
premature, however if the group isn't going to be open to changes, there
is no point trying to find them, time would be better spent finding
alternates. That would be ashame as I think Cygwin is the most
progessive tool available for IT and development work.  Certainly for
those attempting to bridge the Linux/UNIX - Windows environment.

Brett

Brett C. Serkez, Techie


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Re: stat(2) triggers on-demand virus scan

2006-01-14 Thread Chris Taylor

Brett Serkez wrote:

On Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 03:35:17PM -0500, Brett Serkez wrote:


I'm still researching, I was going to respond this is posting at a
later time with more insight, but before things get out-of-hand, I
wanted to jump in.  I suppose I'm still hopeful that we can zero in
on what precisely is causing the on-demand scanners to consume so
much CPU. Since Windows programs don't trigger the same level of
response (or atleast they don't appear to) their must be some change
that can be made.


I just wanted to make it clear that we aren't going to be making any
special concessions to a product like a virus scanner which cause
perfectly acceptable code to misbehave.  If that is the case then it
is a situation for the virus scanner to work out.  It's not a
requirement that cygwin work around things like this.



Well, that is a pretty strong statement, I'd expect from a for-profit
company run by corporate management.  ZoneLabs offical stance is that
they don't support emulated environments.  Humm...  So if neither are
willing to change, then what?  I don't know Symantec's or McAfee's
offical stance.


They're likely to be the same.

While cgf's statement could be interpreted in the same vein, you have to 
look at it from other points of view as well.. See comments below.




As far as coding being 'perfectly acceptable', that is a matter of
point-of-
view.  If it causes such behavior, is it acceptable?


Cygwin is not what is at fault here - it is the way many on-demand virus 
scanners interact with the OS, the OS itself, and how ZA hooks in to the 
net-code, that cause these issues.


Cygwin code is correct according to ms sdk and available documentation - 
it uses the correct and most accurate methods to implement POSIX 
functionality and *nix integration that are available and known.
(Note that this statement is not entirely accurate, or the next would 
not be at all) Obviously, as time goes on, improvements can be made, but 
that is the nature of software development.




While I respect the purist point of view, one I've held over the years,
seems that we need to be practical sometimes.  Are you saying that if
the problem could be isolated, and reasonable changes proposed, you
wouldn't make/allow them?  Do we want IT administrators to utilize
Cygwin to integrate with the Linux/UNIX environment?  If this means not
being able to effectively use Cygwin if they are also required to run
ZoneAlarm, Norton, McAfee, what choice do you think they'll make, or
more precisely, their management will make on their behalf?


If a change could be made to correct the issues that cygwin has on 
systems that have these products 'inflicted' upon them [1], without 
causing any reduction in performance in other circumstances, making the 
code vastly more complex, or requiring additional resources or user 
intervention, then I suspect it would become a PTC issue.


[1] - I choose the word inflicted deliberately - in my experience, 
norton and mcafee are very bad AV products, and only getting worse as 
they forcibly integrate other products into them. They frequently miss 
genuine threats and generate false positives, and fail thorough tests on 
a regular basis.



As a rule, IT admins have sufficient say that they can change company 
policy in regards to AV and firewall software.
Indeed, in a corporate environment, it is *extremely* unusual to come 
across software firewalls being in use, beyond possibly an 
implementation of IPTables filtering traffic between the network and the 
internet, and between remote sites.
Usually, there will be hardware firewalls, such as FW1, Cisco PIX, or 
Nokia's firewall product, whose name I forget.


If you name a circumstance where office-based machines require a 
software firewall, a strong argument can be made as to how and why that 
network has not been properly secured.

In my opinion, this also applies to on-access virus scanners.
Feel free to ask me why in a direct email, that would be OT for this list.



Since we ultimately don't know the root cause, this discussion is
premature, however if the group isn't going to be open to changes, there
is no point trying to find them, time would be better spent finding
alternates. That would be ashame as I think Cygwin is the most
progessive tool available for IT and development work.  Certainly for
those attempting to bridge the Linux/UNIX - Windows environment.



In all honest, you have three options that can be used within windows.
Cygwin, MinGW, and SFU.

Of those, MinGW is not really all that well suited to these 
circumstances, and SFU does not have nearly the range of capabilities 
that Cygwin has.


While cgf is on record as saying he does not want to work around issues 
with other software, if evidence were to emerge to show cygwin could use 
another method without any detriment, I imagine it would be considered.


However, specifically with regards to on-access AV, I don't believe 
there will be another way to deal with this,

Re: stat(2) triggers on-demand virus scan

2006-01-14 Thread Christopher Faylor
On Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 04:18:43PM -0500, Brett Serkez wrote:
>>On Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 03:35:17PM -0500, Brett Serkez wrote:
>>>I'm still researching, I was going to respond this is posting at a
>>>later time with more insight, but before things get out-of-hand, I
>>>wanted to jump in.  I suppose I'm still hopeful that we can zero in on
>>>what precisely is causing the on-demand scanners to consume so much
>>>CPU.  Since Windows programs don't trigger the same level of response
>>>(or atleast they don't appear to) their must be some change that can be
>>>made.
>>
>>I just wanted to make it clear that we aren't going to be making any
>>special concessions to a product like a virus scanner which cause
>>perfectly acceptable code to misbehave.  If that is the case then it is
>>a situation for the virus scanner to work out.  It's not a requirement
>>that Cygwin work around things like this.
>
>Well, that is a pretty strong statement, I'd expect from a for-profit
>company run by corporate management.

This is a practical decision.

We are not going to visit the slippery slope of adding code to Cygwin to
work around other third party software.  We already have more than
enough to worry about with different windows versions.  Adding the
combinatorial nightmare of worrying about different windows versions *
different virus scanners is not something I'm really interested in.

Even if we did want to do this, how do we decide what software we should
make concessions for?  You're using ZoneAlarm.  Is that a really popular
package among windows users?  If so, do we need a dedicated ZoneAlarm
specialist on staff to make sure that every change that Corinna or I
make to Cygwin does not cause problems for ZoneAlarm?  How about McAfee?
Do we need someone to worry about them, too?  How about sysinternals?  I
think some of their software causes cygwin to behave strangely.  Do we
need a Sysinternals expert?

Or do we just pay attention to the loudest voice and then pull the
concession code out of Cygwin when the voice goes away because Corinna
and I can no longer test and support it?

>ZoneLabs offical stance is that they don't support emulated
>environments.  Humm...  So if neither are willing to change, then what?
>I don't know Symantec's or McAfee's offical stance.

Cygwin is a program which uses standard the win32 api.  The fact that
the win32 api is used to present a bash prompt is no different than
using the win32 api to present a word processor screen.  Assuming that
the "emulated environment" above actually refers to Cygwin then failure
on Zonealarm's part to fix bugs that cause Cygwin's use of the windows
API to misbehave is an arbitrary distinction and a cop-out.

>As far as coding being 'perfectly acceptable', that is a matter of
>point-of- view.  If it causes such behavior, is it acceptable?

It is not a matter of a point of view if code works as documented in a
virus-scanner-free environment and fails to work when a virus scanner is
installed.

However, this is a free software project so people have the ability to
inspect the source code and offer patches.  If someone offers a patch to
fix problems with a virus scanner which doesn't involve any special
tests for the virus scanner, doesn't involve extra code to work around
the virus scanner, and doesn't involve doing something like, say, using
sockets instead of pipes because the virus scanner doesn't like pipes,
then, sure, we'll consider the code.  Otherwise, this is what I would
call a "special concession to third party software" and I'm not
interested in littering the code with those.

Perhaps Corinna has a different opinion and will convince me otherwise
but, until that time, I just thought I would make the ground rules
clear.  I thought this was obvious stuff but I guess it wasn't.

cgf

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Re: stat(2) triggers on-demand virus scan

2006-01-14 Thread Brett Serkez
[snip]
> We are not going to visit the slippery slope of adding code to Cygwin
> to  work around other third party software.

I'm hoping and assuming it is going to be more a matter of making minor
changes, if it requires a major change, then it is more likely Microsoft
or some other vendor is at fault.

[snip]
> >ZoneLabs offical stance is that they don't support emulated
> >environments.  Humm...  So if neither are willing to change, then
> >what? I don't know Symantec's or McAfee's offical stance.
>
> Cygwin is a program which uses standard the win32 api.  The fact that
> the win32 api is used to present a bash prompt is no different than
> using the win32 api to present a word processor screen.  Assuming that
> the "emulated environment" above actually refers to Cygwin then
> failure on Zonealarm's part to fix bugs that cause Cygwin's use of the
> windows API to misbehave is an arbitrary distinction and a cop-out.

Strongly agreed.  I've already pointed this out to them to no avail.

> >As far as coding being 'perfectly acceptable', that is a matter of
> >point-of- view.  If it causes such behavior, is it acceptable?
>
> It is not a matter of a point of view if code works as documented in a
> virus-scanner-free environment and fails to work when a virus scanner
> is installed.

>From what I've been seeing, I'm starting to suspect that the problem(s)
is
there in both cases, the scanner simply makes it much more noticable.  I
do see more CPU consumption that I woud have expected even without the
virus scanner and the original poster's calling out stat was most
interesting.

[snip]

Brett

Brett C. Serkez, Techie


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Re: stat(2) triggers on-demand virus scan

2006-01-14 Thread Paul McFerrin

Boy did I open a can of worms!

When I looked at the source of Cygwin1.dll a few years ago at the time, the stat(2) 
basically called a MS API function to retreive the information and then did a simpe return. 
 I think it the faulty design of MS not to privide a function to get status information 
without triggering all sorts of other OS's overhead (e.g. on-demand scanning).


If the stat(2) is following the MS SDK guidelines for POSTIX compatability, then I don't see 
much other attractive recourse but live with MS supid design.  After it *is* MS.  Unless 
there is some obsolete non-POSTIX MS API that retrieves this information that does not have 
this side effect, then I'll live with it.  It does seem silly to me that you can't perform a 
stat(2) without triggering side effects.  Maybe I'm too much of a Unix Geru.


Here is something a little OT

When making comparisons between multiple runs to run timing tests before and after a change, 
it there a way I can guarantee more consistent results?  e.g.  Condider the following:


time find . -print | wc -l

I can run the above sequence 3 times in a row and get huge differences due to OS caching and 
probably application caching (281 secs, 11 secs, 0.8 secs respectively).  Is there any known 
way within MS XP Pro to flush all caching other than a reboot??  I run into similar problems 
when validating multiple copies of a CD-R by calculating the checksum.  The first checksum 
is valid but I can't trust the remainder due to OS caching.


-Paul

Christopher Faylor wrote:

On Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 04:18:43PM -0500, Brett Serkez wrote:


On Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 03:35:17PM -0500, Brett Serkez wrote:


I'm still researching, I was going to respond this is posting at a
later time with more insight, but before things get out-of-hand, I
wanted to jump in.  I suppose I'm still hopeful that we can zero in on
what precisely is causing the on-demand scanners to consume so much
CPU.  Since Windows programs don't trigger the same level of response
(or atleast they don't appear to) their must be some change that can be
made.


I just wanted to make it clear that we aren't going to be making any
special concessions to a product like a virus scanner which cause
perfectly acceptable code to misbehave.  If that is the case then it is
a situation for the virus scanner to work out.  It's not a requirement
that Cygwin work around things like this.


Well, that is a pretty strong statement, I'd expect from a for-profit
company run by corporate management.



This is a practical decision.

We are not going to visit the slippery slope of adding code to Cygwin to
work around other third party software.  We already have more than
enough to worry about with different windows versions.  Adding the
combinatorial nightmare of worrying about different windows versions *
different virus scanners is not something I'm really interested in.

Even if we did want to do this, how do we decide what software we should
make concessions for?  You're using ZoneAlarm.  Is that a really popular
package among windows users?  If so, do we need a dedicated ZoneAlarm
specialist on staff to make sure that every change that Corinna or I
make to Cygwin does not cause problems for ZoneAlarm?  How about McAfee?
Do we need someone to worry about them, too?  How about sysinternals?  I
think some of their software causes cygwin to behave strangely.  Do we
need a Sysinternals expert?

Or do we just pay attention to the loudest voice and then pull the
concession code out of Cygwin when the voice goes away because Corinna
and I can no longer test and support it?



ZoneLabs offical stance is that they don't support emulated
environments.  Humm...  So if neither are willing to change, then what?
I don't know Symantec's or McAfee's offical stance.



Cygwin is a program which uses standard the win32 api.  The fact that
the win32 api is used to present a bash prompt is no different than
using the win32 api to present a word processor screen.  Assuming that
the "emulated environment" above actually refers to Cygwin then failure
on Zonealarm's part to fix bugs that cause Cygwin's use of the windows
API to misbehave is an arbitrary distinction and a cop-out.



As far as coding being 'perfectly acceptable', that is a matter of
point-of- view.  If it causes such behavior, is it acceptable?



It is not a matter of a point of view if code works as documented in a
virus-scanner-free environment and fails to work when a virus scanner is
installed.

However, this is a free software project so people have the ability to
inspect the source code and offer patches.  If someone offers a patch to
fix problems with a virus scanner which doesn't involve any special
tests for the virus scanner, doesn't involve extra code to work around
the virus scanner, and doesn't involve doing something like, say, using
sockets instead of pipes because the virus scanner doesn't like pipes,
then, sure, we'll consider the code.  Otherwise, this

Re: once more unto the breech - please try a snapshot so I can release this thing

2006-01-14 Thread Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes
On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 08:35:18PM -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 11, 2006 at 10:46:24PM -0800, Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes wrote:
> >Just in case it's relevant, note that I have experimental bash,
> >readline, libreadline6, findutils, and coreutils.
> 
> Does the latest snapshot behave any differently?  Neither Corinna nor
> I can duplicate this problem so neither of us can do anything other
> than shoot in the dark to try to solve it.

I haven't had it happen again using 20060112.

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Re: Stat(2) trigger on-demand virus scan

2006-01-14 Thread Paul McFerrin

Brett Serkez wrote:

[snip]

>
>> From what I've been seeing, I'm starting to suspect that the problem(s)
>
> is
> there in both cases, the scanner simply makes it much more noticable.  I
> do see more CPU consumption that I woud have expected even without the
> virus scanner and the original poster's calling out stat was most
> interesting.
>

Interesting observation..  I just assummed it was the stat(2) call since the only thing 
I was doing was a "find ... >file".  I know that find (or at least the SysV version) does a 
readdir(3) syscall and I just totally ignored it.  Even it it was readdir(3), MS should not 
be triggering on-demand scanner hooks for directory-only operations.


-paul



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Re: Stat(2) trigger on-demand virus scan

2006-01-14 Thread Christopher Faylor
On Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 09:12:11PM -0500, Paul McFerrin wrote:
>Brett Serkez wrote:
>>> From what I've been seeing, I'm starting to suspect that the problem(s)
>>is there in both cases, the scanner simply makes it much more
>>noticable.  I do see more CPU consumption that I woud have expected
>>even without the virus scanner and the original poster's calling out
>>stat was most interesting.
>
>Interesting observation..  I just assummed it was the stat(2) call
>since the only thing I was doing was a "find ...  >file".  I know that
>find (or at least the SysV version) does a readdir(3) syscall and I
>just totally ignored it.  Even it it was readdir(3), MS should not be
>triggering on-demand scanner hooks for directory-only operations.

I'd suggest taking a look at the source code before drawing any
conclusions about what should or shouldn't be happening.

stat() is, and always has been, a complicated function.  readdir() isn't
quite as complicated but it is not just a trivial wrapper around a
windows function.  Very little in cygwin is that trivial and assuming
that things are that simple will certainly lead you to draw faulty
conclusions.

cgf

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RE: stat(2) triggers on-demand virus scan

2006-01-14 Thread Gary R. Van Sickle
[snip]
> >>I just wanted to make it clear that we aren't going to be 
> making any 
> >>special concessions to a product like a virus scanner which cause 
> >>perfectly acceptable code to misbehave.  If that is the 
> case then it 
> >>is a situation for the virus scanner to work out.  It's not a 
> >>requirement that Cygwin work around things like this.
> >
> >Well, that is a pretty strong statement, I'd expect from a 
> for-profit 
> >company run by corporate management.
> 
> This is a practical decision.
> 
> We are not going to visit the slippery slope of adding code 
> to Cygwin to work around other third party software.  We 

Huh?  Has it even been 24 hours since you suggested Cygwin be changed in a
non-standardized manner merely to band-aid a broken third-party IRC client?
And doesn't Cygwin still create sparse files for the benefit of one single
third-party application?  The slope you mention has already been visited on
more than one occaision.

[snip]
> However, this is a free software project so people have the 
> ability to inspect the source code and offer patches.  If 
> someone offers a patch to fix problems with a virus scanner 
> which doesn't involve any special tests for the virus 
> scanner, doesn't involve extra code to work around the virus 
> scanner, and doesn't involve doing something like, say, using 
> sockets instead of pipes because the virus scanner doesn't 
> like pipes, then, sure, we'll consider the code.  Otherwise, 
> this is what I would call a "special concession to third 
> party software" and I'm not interested in littering the code 
> with those.
> 

Again, that last sentence is simply not a true statement, unless you want to
split hairs about the "littering" part.  And I have to question the veracity
of a "PTC" statement that has as its prerequisites that the patch involve no
actual code.

> Perhaps Corinna has a different opinion and will convince me 
> otherwise but, until that time, I just thought I would make 
> the ground rules clear.  I thought this was obvious stuff but 
> I guess it wasn't.
> 

No, and I guess it still isn't.

BTW, OP: Update your 1.3.x install.  It's the 21st century for God's sake.

-- 
Gary R. Van Sickle


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RE: stat(2) triggers on-demand virus scan

2006-01-14 Thread Gary R. Van Sickle
> From: Paul McFerrin
> Sent: Saturday, January 14, 2006 5:19 PM
> To: Cygwin@Cygwin.com
> Subject: Re: stat(2) triggers on-demand virus scan
> 
> Boy did I open a can of worms!
> 

No, it's like this on a regular, periodic basis.

> When I looked at the source of Cygwin1.dll a few years ago at 
> the time, the stat(2) basically called a MS API function to 
> retreive the information and then did a simpe return. 
>   I think it the faulty design of MS not to privide a 
> function to get status information without triggering all 
> sorts of other OS's overhead (e.g. on-demand scanning).
> 
> If the stat(2) is following the MS SDK guidelines for POSTIX 

...um, POSIX.  It's POSIX.

> compatability, then I don't see much other attractive 
> recourse but live with MS supid design.

What Chris F. said.  Plus, while I refuse to defend the ability of MS's
Operating Systems to properly work with Disks (admittedly it's a new thing
for them), stat's definition and/or the way many programs use stat is the
real culprit here.

>  After it *is* MS.  
> Unless there is some obsolete non-POSTIX MS API that 
> retrieves this information that does not have this side 
> effect, then I'll live with it.  It does seem silly to me 
> that you can't perform a
> stat(2) without triggering side effects.  Maybe I'm too much 
> of a Unix Geru.
> 
> Here is something a little OT
> 
> When making comparisons between multiple runs to run timing 
> tests before and after a change, it there a way I can 
> guarantee more consistent results?  e.g.  Condider the following:
> 
>   time find . -print | wc -l
> 
> I can run the above sequence 3 times in a row and get huge 
> differences due to OS caching and probably application 
> caching (281 secs, 11 secs, 0.8 secs respectively).  Is there 
> any known way within MS XP Pro to flush all caching other 
> than a reboot??

The short non-rant answer to that is no, there isn't.

The long non-rant answer would require a logical explanation from Microsoft
as to why their filesystem infrastructure is completely incapable of
properly handling removable media, and that is highly unlikely to be
forthcoming.

-- 
Gary R. Van Sickle
 


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RE: stat(2) triggers on-demand virus scan

2006-01-14 Thread Gary R. Van Sickle
> From: Brett Serkez
> Sent: Saturday, January 14, 2006 3:19 PM
> To: cygwin@cygwin.com; cygwin@cygwin.com
> Subject: Re: stat(2) triggers on-demand virus scan
> 
> > On Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 03:35:17PM -0500, Brett Serkez wrote:
> > >I'm still researching, I was going to respond this is posting at a 
> > >later time with more insight, but before things get out-of-hand, I 
> > >wanted to jump in.  I suppose I'm still hopeful that we 
> can zero in 
> > >on what precisely is causing the on-demand scanners to consume so 
> > >much CPU. Since Windows programs don't trigger the same level of 
> > >response (or atleast they don't appear to) their must be 
> some change 
> > >that can be made.
> >
> > I just wanted to make it clear that we aren't going to be 
> making any 
> > special concessions to a product like a virus scanner which cause 
> > perfectly acceptable code to misbehave.  If that is the 
> case then it 
> > is a situation for the virus scanner to work out.  It's not a 
> > requirement that cygwin work around things like this.
> 
> Well, that is a pretty strong statement, I'd expect from a 
> for-profit company run by corporate management.  ZoneLabs 
> offical stance is that they don't support emulated 
> environments.

I have to assume whoever said or wrote that was either thinking "Wine", or
not thinking at all, since Cygwin is ultimately no different than any other
Windows application from their software's perspective.

>  Humm...  So if neither are willing to change, 
> then what?  I don't know Symantec's or McAfee's offical stance.
> 

Last I checked it was "cause more problems than the viruses we purportedly
protect you from would".

Look guys, the bottom line here is that on-access virus scanners cause
trouble.  Not just for Cygwin, and not just particular ones.  Scan your
incoming email, scan your downloads, do your backups, cross your fingers,
and hope for a horrible death for the virus-writing idiots of the world.

-- 
Gary R. Van Sickle
 


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