Troubleshooting Mac OS X 10.3 (#20): Quartz bug and Camino; netstat runs wild

Quartz bug and Camino There is an apparent bug in Mac OS X 10.3's Quartz implementation that causes rendering problems in the Web browser Camino. Essentially, the bug (which manifests in iframe text boxes with Camino) allows text to flow outside the boundary of any text box using a QuickDraw view.

Mike Pinkerton, author of the Camino browser, reports on his web log that the problem involves Quartz' anti-aliasing capabilities:

"I was able to figure out at least one of the big issues with Camino redrawing poorly on panther, and it's a bug in Panther itself. Any text drawn in a NSQuickdrawView that has quartz anti-aliasing turned on (which camino does) will overflow the bounds of the view when the window is resized. [...]"

Pinkerton also posted an xCode sample project that demonstrates the bug in Mac OS X 10.3.x.

netstat runs wild Two separate users have reported a similar bug on the same system (a dual-2 GHz Power Mac G5), where after a certain amount of uptime the netstat process (which is automatically run at a set interval) will start returning the string "netstat: kvm_read: Bad address" over and over again. This will stall Network Utility until you force quit it.

Unfortunately, the problem is not only causing Network Utility to quit, but is also apparently eating processor cycles with its infinite scrolling of error messages.

MacFixIt reader Marc Marshall writes:

"All other netstat commands appear to work properly, and it seems to work properly when the computer is first restarted as well, but the error is consistently repeatable. It seems to work properly on a G4 1GHz DP upgraded similarly to 10.3.1, however.

"This issue is particularly annoying, because there is some background process in OSX that launches a netstat process (as root) about every day and processes its output with sed (a text editor). Because of the problem, when this happens that background netstat process will sit there chewing up 100 percent of a processor unless it is manually terminated or the computer restarted."

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