(call-process ...) hangs in emacs
Ken Brown
kbrown@cornell.edu
Thu Aug 7 18:54:00 GMT 2014
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
--
Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
More information about the Cygwin
mailing list