Re: [PATCH] Futex Asynchronous Interface

[Peter Wächtler]

Rusty Russell wrote:
> In message <[e-mail]> you wri
> te:
> 
>>Rusty,
>> this makes no sense:
>>
>>D: This changes the implementation so that the waker actually unpins
>>D: the page.  This is preparation for the async interface, where the
>>D: process which registered interest is not in the kernel.
>>
>>Whazzup? The closing of the fd will unpin the page, the waker has no
>>reason to do so. It is very much against the linux philosophy (and a
>>design disaster anyway) to have the waker muck with the data structures of
>>anything waiting.
>>
> 
> Good catch: now the fd is a "one-shot" thing anyway, making close
> unpin the page makes more sense.  Tested patch below (against 2.5.21).
> 
> FYI: I already violate this philosophy as I remove the waiter from the
> queue when I wake them: this allows them to tell that they were woken
> (waker does a list_del_init() on the waiting entry, so waiting knows
> if (list_empty()) I was woken).
> 
> It would be more natural for the waiter to examine the futex value,
> and if it's still unchanged go back to sleep.  But this makes
> assumptions about what they're using the futex value for.  For
> example, we "PASS_THIS_DIRECTLY" value into the futex.  This requires
> that one (and ONLY one) process waiting actually wakes up.
> 
> This is why coming up with a primitive which allowed us to build posix
> threads and fair queueing as well as "normal" unfair semantics took so
> damn long.
> 

What are the plans on how to deal with a waiter when the lock holder
dies abnormally?

What about sending a signal (SIGTRAP or SIGLOST), returning -1 and
setting errno to a reasonable value (EIO?)

I couldn't find anything in susv3