[Opendnssec-maintainers] RE: 1.4 release - issue found with the multi-threaded enforcer

[Sara Dickinson]

All, 

Last week a serious issue was uncovered with the multi-threaded enforcer functionality that was added in the 1.4 release. The issue was only seen when running in certain scenarios with multiple threads (the default for 1.4 was single-threaded mode). After an investigation it was agreed that the best solution was to remove the multi-threaded code from the 1.4 code base since the issue could not be fixed in a satisfactory way. Obviously this is a significant change to make at this stage and will unfortunately slightly delay the release. However, we are convinced that this is the correct technical decision in the long run.

We are planning to briefly move the 1.4 release back to beta status while tests are run on the updated code. The code change is actually straightforward, and effectively reverts the enforcer component in 1.4 back to the 1.3 code base with very minor 1.4 specific changes. As such the basic functionality is not in question, however since the rollback is a manual process we feel a full sanity check of the result is necessary. The updated code has already been through a review process and initial testing and was committed to trunk yesterday. The 1.4.0b3 release will be available shortly. Once further testing is complete on this, we anticipate moving to a 1.4.0rc3 release asap.

Regards

Sara.