svn commit: r233103 - head/lib/libthr/thread

David Xu listlog2011 at gmail.com
Mon Mar 19 23:53:46 UTC 2012


On 2012/3/20 1:50, John Baldwin wrote:
> On Monday, March 19, 2012 11:41:53 am David Xu wrote:
>> On 2012/3/19 20:33, John Baldwin wrote:
>>> On Saturday, March 17, 2012 8:22:29 pm David Xu wrote:
>>>> Author: davidxu
>>>> Date: Sun Mar 18 00:22:29 2012
>>>> New Revision: 233103
>>>> URL: http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/233103
>>>>
>>>> Log:
>>>>     Some software think a mutex can be destroyed after it owned it, for
>>>>     example, it uses a serialization point like following:
>>>>     	pthread_mutex_lock(&mutex);
>>>>     	pthread_mutex_unlock(&mutex);
>>>>     	pthread_mutex_destroy(&muetx);
>>>>     They think a previous lock holder should have already left the mutex and
>>>>     is no longer referencing it, so they destroy it. To be maximum compatible
>>>>     with such code, we use IA64 version to unlock the mutex in kernel, remove
>>>>     the two steps unlocking code.
>>> But this means they destroy the lock while another thread holds it?  That
>>> seems wrong.  It's one thing if they know that no other thread has a reference
>>> to the lock (e.g. it's in a refcounted object and the current thread just
>>> dropped the reference count to zero).  However, in that case no other thread
>>> can unlock it after this thread destroys it.  Code that does this seems very
>>> buggy, since if the address can be unmapped it can also be remapped and
>>> assigned to another lock, etc., so you could have a thread try to unlock a
>>> lock it doesn't hold.
>> They have handshake code to indicate that the mutex is no longer used by
>> previous
>> holder. e.g:
>>
>> thread 1:
>>       pthread_mutex_lock(&mutex);
>>       done = 1;
>>       pthread_mutex_unlock(&mutex);
>> thread 2:
>>       pthread_mutex_lock(&mutex);
>>       temp = done;
>>       pthread_mutex_unlock(&mutex);
>>       if (temp == 1)
>>           pthread_mutex_destroy(&mutex);
> Hmm, so how does this result in the crash you fixed?  That is, thread 1 has
> to fully finish pthread_mutex_unlock() before thread2's pthread_mutex_lock()
> can succeed, so I don't see how thread 1 could still be in
> pthread_mutex_unlock() when thread 2 calls pthread_mutex_destroy().
This is implementation detail,thread1 does unlocking in two steps:
first it clears lock bit, but leaves contention bit there,
then thread2 enters and sets lock bit, and then destroy it.
T1:
    clear lock bit, contention bit is still set.
T2:
    lock the mutex by setting lock bit.
    do some work.
    unlock the mutex by clearing lock it,
      enters kernel, and see no waiters, clears contention bit.
    destroy the mutex, unmap memory
T1:
    enter kernel to clear contention bit, because the memory
    is unmmaped, it returns EINVAL.



>
>> I guess one crash of Python is also caused by the logic, though they use
>> semaphore
>> instead of mutex + condition variable to mimic lock.
>> POSIX even explicitly requires a condition variable to be destroyable
>> after broadcast,
>> once you have correct teardown code. Please read its example section:
>> http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/functions/pthread_cond_destroy.html
> This is quite different as assuming a broadcast marks all the threads as runnable
> and removes them from the cv's queue, none of the threads will have references to
> the cv so it will be safe to destroy.  It would not be safe to destroy the mutex
> in that case though (and the example does not destroy the mutex, only the cv).
>

Please see section "Destroying mutexes":
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904875/functions/pthread_mutex_init.html



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