The problem is that a SELECT .. FOR UPDATE statement might open
a table and later wait for a impeding global read lock without
noticing whether it is holding a table that is being waited upon
the the flush phase of the process that took the global read
lock.

The same problem also affected the following statements:

LOCK TABLES .. WRITE
UPDATE .. SET (update and multi-table update)
TRUNCATE TABLE ..
LOAD DATA ..

The solution is to make the above statements wait for a impending
global read lock before opening the tables. If there is no
impending global read lock, the statement raises a temporary
protection against global read locks and progresses smoothly
towards completion.

Important notice: the patch does not try to address all possible
cases, only those which are common and can be fixed unintrusively
enough for 5.0.