Major failure plagues Second Life Mono deployment
Over the course of the week, we've been getting scattered reports of problems on the Second Life grid relating to the new Mono script-engine runtime that was deployed as a part of SLS-1.24. The key phrase seems to be "catastrophic mono bytecode serialization failure".
The problem itself doesn't appear to be highly reproducible, but by the accounts we're getting, when it occurs, the Mono runtime flings a complex exception, and most or all of the Mono scripts in the simulator where the exception occurred shut down, and stay that way, pending individual and manual attention.
SLS-1.24.4 rolled out on 3 September, though that apparently did not correct the problem, as we have reports of it from users as late as 4 September, despite the relative infrequency of its occurrence.
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A 1.24.5 version was completed on 5 September, apparently ready for deployment, but there is (as yet) no information as to when it will be rolled out onto the main grid. 1.24.5 appears to only contain a partial fix for the issue.
The bug itself is documented as SVC-2908 in the public JIRA.
To be fair, bolting on an entirely new scripting runtime engine underneath the existing language and communicating with the simulator's script APIs is a truly mammoth task. New simulator builds seem to be being tested on a daily basis as Babbage Linden's team is working (apparently around the clock, by all indications) to get this bug fixed and the runtime engine stabilized.
Update: 1.24.5 appears to be tentatively scheduled for deployment starting Wednesday, 10 September.
