On 10/13/2014 02:06 AM, Daiki Ueno wrote: > Hello, > > Forwarding to the mailing lists to get more feedback; the original > report can be found at <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?43404>. > > (I've changed the tracker configuration so that all reports will be sent > to the mailing list hereafter.) > > Peter Eisentraut <invalid.nore...@gnu.org> writes: > >> Something in libintl calls setlocale(), which calls gl_locale_name_default(), >> which calls CFLocaleCopyCurrent() on OS X. Our analysis shows that >> CFLocaleCopyCurrent() spins up an additional thread, which causes all kinds >> of >> chaos in signal handlers and forked processes. Here is the full analysis: >> http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20140915045114.ga1332...@tornado.leadboat.com >> >> Clearly, this is a somewhat special application, compared to all the >> single-threaded, single-process programs out there, but if adding gettext >> support to a server causes it to crash in random ways, that doesn't seem >> nice. >> >> The original change in gettext/libintl is >> d4fd77b3f57a386b63083a7246ae5808510ac072. >> >> Later in the above thread, a patch is proposed to move the Core Foundation >> calls into a subprocess, which you might be interested in. > > That sounds like an interesting idea. Perhaps gl_locale_name_default > could use the pipe/fork trick around the Core Foundation calls, for > single-threaded consumer (using pthread_is_threaded_np). Is this kind > of change acceptable in Gnulib? > > By the way, the issue reminds me of: > http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gettext/2013-11/msg00020.html > though it is a different (multi-threaded consumer) case.
There are many consequences to having multiple threads, so it's worth avoiding/isolating that where possible. You mentioned it would be conditionalized on pthread_is_threaded_np for performance I suppose, as threaded progs would already have to deal with the consequences of a separate thread. So races in pthread_is_threaded_np would only be a small performance issue. Seems like a good idea to me. thanks, Pádraig.
