Bug 69711

Summary: mainloop wakeup is race-y and can eat 100% cpu
Product: PulseAudio Reporter: Pierre Ossman <pierre-bugzilla>
Component: coreAssignee: pulseaudio-bugs
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact: pulseaudio-bugs
Severity: normal    
Priority: medium CC: astrand, lennart
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: Other   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:
Attachments: 0005-mainloop-avoid-race-y-double-wakeup-status.patch

Description Pierre Ossman 2013-09-23 13:12:41 UTC
Created attachment 86366 [details]
0005-mainloop-avoid-race-y-double-wakeup-status.patch

There's been a lot of fiddling with the mainloop's wakeup code since I wrote it. Unfortunately the current implementation is race-y and can send pa_poll() into a loop where it returns right away and the process starts eating 100% CPU.

What happens is:

 1. pa_mainloop_wakeup() is called.

 2. A wakeup byte is written on the pipe.

 3. The atomic status variable is updated.

 4. clear_wakeup() is called.

 5. The atomic status variable is checked, and reset.

 6. The pipe is read, but data has yet to propagate from the write end to the read end so we get nothing.

 7. poll() is called, but returns quickly as there is now a byte sitting in the pipe.

 8. clear_wakeup() is called, but won't read anything since the atomic status claims the pipe is empty.

 9. goto 7.

The attached patch simply removes the extra variable. The pipe has atomic properties so it is quite sufficient by itself.

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