strace fails to attach to child when parent calls exit too fast

[Roman Fiedler]

There is a known issue in strace, where attaching to children fails due to races in strace code. See [1] for description of the bug on strace developer mailing list. A patch [2] was created 2013-07-08 to fix the problem. The problem might also occur when debugging real-world applications, thus obscuring the real cause of a problem, e.g. in [3].

# lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
Release: 14.04

# apt-cache policy strace
strace:
  Installed: 4.8-1ubuntu5
  Candidate: 4.8-1ubuntu5
  Version table:
 *** 4.8-1ubuntu5 0
        500 http://debarchive-ehealth.d03.arc.local/ubuntu/ trusty/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[1] https://<email address hidden>/msg03273.html
[2] http://sourceforge.net/p/strace/code/ci/d2e1f42d8a28486484f00739e561a58be4808b03/
[3] http://sourceforge.net/p/zabbix/mailman/message/32359321/