GnuPG + FreeBSD 5.3 = intermitent memory warning

[Robert Watson]

On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, David Shaw wrote:

> It took me a while to track this down, and thanks to Atom for helping me
> run some FreeBSD tests.  It turns out that this isn't a GnuPG specific
> problem.  The same problem can be duplicated by running any program that
> calls mlock() on FreeBSD. 
> 
> FreeBSD has a "1/3 of memory" hard limit for mlock().  What seems to
> have happened is that for whatever reason, Atom's system was very close
> to the 1/3 magic number, and so when GnuPG tried to get its lock, it was
> sometimes refused.  This also explains why a busy system seemed to
> aggravate the problem. 
> 
> In terms of what to do about this in GnuPG, I'm not sure if there should
> be anything done.  I think the the current GnuPG behavior is pretty
> good: try to get locked memory, and if it can't, warn the user. 

I wonder if it would make sense for gnupg to print additional error
information when printing the insecure memory warning?  Specifically, to
help identify what errno value was returned by a failing call to mlock(). 
This would make it easier to determine the cause of a reported failure
("EPERM - not running setuid", "EAGAIN - system/process resource limits
reached").

Robert N M Watson