[Bordeaux-threads-devel] [Updated4] Patch for ABCL against BORDEAUX-THREADS HEAD
Mark Evenson
evenson at panix.com
Fri Mar 18 07:50:50 UTC 2011
On 3/2/11 8:50 PM, Martin Simmons wrote:
> I think that the implementation of condition-wait has some major problems:
Thanks very much for the comments.
I have an [updated patch][1] that attempts to address these issues for
further review for inclusion in BORDEAUX-THREADS.
[1]:
http://detroit.slack.net/~evenson/abcl/bordeaux-threads-abcl-20110318a.diff
> 1) If no other threads are trying to claim the lock, then condition-wait will
> return immediately rather than waiting.
I couldn't reproduce this behavior. In ABCL, the THREADS:OBJECT-WAIT
implementation is mainly a simple wrapping of the underlying
[java.lang.Object.wait()][2] which clearly should wait.
[2]:
http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/lang/Object.html#wait%28%29
> 2) If two threads are waiting in condition-wait and two other threads call
> condition-notify, then it is possible that only one thread will return from
> condition-wait because the call to acquire-lock in one of them might return
> nil causing it to wait again.
The DO looping construct has been replaced with a simpler subsequent
BT:ACQUIRE-LOCK that should solve this bug.
> 3) If condition-notify is called by one thread when a waiting thread is just
> about to enter the threads:synchronized-on form (but before it gets
> synchronized), then the notify will be lost. This happens because the
> underlying threading primitives have no "memory" of calls to notify when
> nothing it waiting (which is also the expected semantics for POSIX condition
> variables BTW).
THREADS:SYNCHRONIZED-ON is now the first form executed by
BT:CONDITION-WAIT so the window here is considerably narrowed.
> Also, I think condition-notify should be using threads:object-notify rather
> than threads:object-notify-all.
We now use THREADS:OBJECT-NOTIFY.
--
"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there
is nothing to compare to it now."
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