Re: [PATCH] rfc: threaded epoll_wait thundering herd

From: Davide Libenzi
Date: Mon May 07 2007 - 18:35:53 EST


On Mon, 7 May 2007, Ulrich Drepper wrote:

> On 5/7/07, Davi Arnaut <davi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > See Linus's message on this same thread.
>
> No. I'm talking about the userlevel side, not kernel side.
>
> If a thread is canceled *after* it returns from the syscall but before
> it reports the event to the call (i.e., while still in the syscall
> wrapper, thread cancellation rules require a check there) the event is
> lost.

read(2) is a cancellation point too. So if the fine userspace code issues
a random pthread_cancel() to a thread handling that, data is lost together
with the session that thread was handling. Hmm, I wonder how the world
could have functioned so far.
Bottom line is, if you really want to throw random cancels to your worker
threads, you better wrap them into pthread_cleanup_push(). Because
otherwise, no matter where your cancel hits, you end up with a broken
system.



- Davide


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