hostd crash when uploading file with long multibyte characters

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Issue/Introduction

• When uploading a large number of files to a datastore by datastore Browser, hostd crashes and the ESXi host become "Not Responding".
• The ESXi will recover from "not responding" immediately.
• The uploaded files have very long paths and contain many multi-byte characters.
• Hostd dump file was created.
  

  [timestamp] In(182) vmkernel: cpu#:###### opID=[opID])UserDump: ######: hostd-worker: Dumping cartel ######(from world ######) to file /var/core/hostd-zdump.000 ..

 

 

 

 

 

 

Environment

ESXi 8.0

 

 

 

Cause

Hostd may crash when processing very long strings that use multi-byte characters.

Resolution

This issue has been fixed in ESX 9.0.

The workaround is to not use multi-byte characters in the path of the file to be uploaded.
In particular, using multi-byte characters after byte 150 may cause this issue.