Re: Recursion bug in -rt

[Dinakar Guniguntala <dino@in.ibm.com>]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2005 at 05:03:13PM -0800, david singleton wrote:
> Dinakar,
> you may be correct, since reverting the change in down_futex seems 
> to work.

Well it did not. It ran for much longer than previously but still 
hung up. 

Well we have a very basic problem in the current implementation. 

Currently if a thread calls pthread_mutex_lock on the same lock 
(normal, non recursive lock) twice without unlocking in between, the 
application hangs. Which is the right behaviour.
However if the same thing is done with a non recursive robust mutex,
it manages to acquire the lock.

I see many problems here (I am assuming that the right behaviour
with robust mutexes is for application to ultimately block
indefinitely in the kernel)

1. In down_futex we do the following check

	if (owner_task != current)
		down_try_futex(lock, owner_task->thread_info __EIP__);

   In the above scenario, the thread would have acquired the uncontended
   lock first time around in userspace. The second time it tries to
   acquire the same mutex, because of the above check, does not
   call down_try_futex and hence will not initialize the lock structure
   in the kernel. It then goes to __down_interruptible where it is 
   granted the lock, which is wrong.

   So IMO the above check is not right. However removing this check
   is not the end of story.  This time it gets to task_blocks_on_lock 
   and tries to grab the task->pi_lock of the owvner which is itself
   and results in a system hang. (Assuming CONFIG_DEBUG_DEADLOCKS
   is not set). So it looks like we need to add some check to 
   prevent this below in case lock_owner happens to be current.

    _raw_spin_lock(&lock_owner(lock)->task->pi_lock);


> However, I'm  wondering if you've hit a bug that Dave Carlson is 
> reporting that he's tracked down to an inline in the glibc patch.

Yes I noticed that, basically it looks like INLINE_SYSCALL, on error
returns -1 with the error code in errno. Whereas we expect the
return code to be the same as the kernel return code. Are you referring
to this or something else ??

However even with all of the above fixes (remove the check in down_futex
as mentioned above, add a check in task_blocks_on_lock and the glibc
changes) my test program continues to hang up the system, though it 
takes a lot longer to recreate the problem now

[snip]

> 1) Why did the library call into the kernel if the calling thread
> owned the lock?

This is something I still havent figured out and leads me to believe
that we still have a tiny race race somewhere

	-Dinakar