On 8/7/2014 11:30 AM, Eric Blake wrote:
On 08/07/2014 05:51 AM, Ken Brown wrote:
I think I found the problem with NORMAL mutexes. emacs calls
pthread_atfork after initializing the mutexes, and the resulting
'prepare' handler locks the mutexes. (The parent and child handlers
unlock them.) So when emacs calls fork, the mutexes are locked, and
shortly thereafter the Cygwin DLL calls calloc, leading to a deadlock.
Here's a gdb backtrace showing the sequence of calls:
Arguably, that's an upstream bug in emacs. POSIX has declared
pthread_atfork to be fundamentally useless; it is broken by design,
because you cannot use it for anything that is not async-signal-safe
without risking deadlock. And (except for sem_post()), NONE of the
standardized locking functions are async-signal-safe.
http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=858
That said, it would still be nice to support this, since even though the
theory says it is broken, there are still lots of (broken)
programs/libraries still trying to use it.
So what do you think emacs should do instead of using pthread_atfork?
Or is it better to just remove it? I don't know how likely it is that
this would cause a problem.
Ken
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