cvs commit: src/share/man/man9 sleep.9

[John Baldwin]

On Wednesday 28 February 2007 01:43, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> On Tuesday, 27 February 2007 at 18:58:43 -0500, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 11:09:32PM +0000, Greg Lehey wrote:
> >
> >>> -function
> >>> -does not work reliably if more than one thread is sleeping on the same 
address;
> >>> -in this case it is possible for an unrelated thread to be woken.
> >>> -This thread will ignore the wakeup, and the correct process will never 
be
> >>> -woken.
> >>> +function does not work reliably if unrelated threads are sleeping on 
the same
> >>> +address.
> >>> +In this case, if a wakeup for one group of threads is delivered to a 
member of
> >>> +another group, that thread will ignore the wakeup, and the correct 
thread will
> >>> +never be woken up.
> >>> +It is the programmer's responsibility to choose a unique
> >>> +.Fa chan
> >>> +value.
> >>> +In case of doubt, do not use
> >>> +.Fn wakeup_one .
> >
> > I don't like this recommendation, since it directs the programmer to
> > introduce potentially serious performance bottlenecks at the expense
> > of clear thinking about their code to avoid introducing the bug in the
> > first place.
> 
> How would you address the case?  Recall that we're talking here about
> two different programmers, and you don't even know who the second one
> is.  It would be nice to have some mechanism like WITLESS to detect
> the problem, but I can't see how it would work.

Actually, sleepq's can have an assert to panic if you don't use the same 
interlock always for a given active sleep address which can go a ways to 
addressing the issue.  I think the real fix is condition variables as they 
allow for a much clearer statement of intent in the code anyway.  To address 
another point in this thread though: using wakeup() doesn't really "fix" the 
issue either unless you properly sleep doing something like:

	while (need_to_sleep) {
		[tm]sleep(...)
	}

If you just do a single sleep() then a wakeup for that address for an 
unrelated events can also result in headaches.  The real fix is to simply not 
abuse sleep addresses for multiple events.

-- 
John Baldwin