Mail Archives: cygwin/2005/02/07/23:52:02
Um... I say Gold Star for this explanation alone, which somehow is
completely free from any hint of sarcasm, "WJM"ness, and passive aggression.
Bad day Chris? ;-)
Oh, and double-gold stars to any and all who coughed up the dough.
--
Gary R. Van Sickle
> -----Original Message-----
> From: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com
> [mailto:cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com] On Behalf Of Christopher Faylor
> Sent: Monday, February 07, 2005 2:44 PM
> To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
> Subject: Re: hyperthreading fix, try #1
>
> On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 08:17:52AM +0100, Volker Bandke wrote:
> >Which system configuration did you use to recreate the problem?
>
> I got enough donations to purchase the following:
>
> Motherboard: ASUS P4P800SE
> Memory: 1G
> CPU: CPU P4/3.0EGHz 800M 478P/1MB HT RT
> HD: Samsung 120GB
> Case: ASPIRE XINFINITY BL 350W RTL
>
> I purchased this from Newegg. I love that company.
>
> I put the system together in one night, turned it on, and it worked.
> All of the lights came on correctly, the system booted with a
> CD, and transferring data from my old system proceeded
> without a hitch, thanks to my knoppix CD -- love that knoppix, too.
>
> The one thing that took me forever to fix was getting XP running.
> Somehow my XP CD got cracked with a big chunk taken out of
> it, so I had to get a new CD, and I ended up transferring
> data from my old system multiple times as I attempted to
> install the new CD without overwriting all of my existing data.
>
> The way I usually do this is to copy raw partitions over,
> since my windows box is multi-boot and represents years of
> work. Sometimes the OS figures out how to reconfigure
> itself, sometimes it needs a nudge.
> In this case, it needed to be whacked with a large branch.
>
> I couldn't get W2K working but I've held off further
> investigations in that for another time.
>
> >also, can you describe (in _short_ terms) the cause of the error?
>
> Cygwin has a problem because normal pipe I/O on windows is
> not interruptible (generically speaking - you could kludge it on NT).
> So, to work around this problem, it starts up pipe i/o in a
> thread and kills the thread when a signal comes in. It's a
> sledge hammer approach to interrupting pipe I/O.
>
> The pipe thread uses a synchronization event to tell the
> initiating reader when the pipe is all set, has grabbed its
> arguments and is ready to go. This event was also used to
> tell the reader that there was a successful read.
>
> Previous to my fix, cygwin did not reliably wait for both
> events to happen so, after the first read on a pipe, it would
> become out of sync. This would present a problem on any kind
> of SMP-like system but it wouldn't be as noticeable on a
> non-SMP system.
>
> Once I ran the test case twenty times or so, I went back and
> looked at the code I'd previously stared at for hours and saw
> a few synchronization issues. For once the back trace from
> gdb showed that something was clearly amiss.
>
> So, the fix was to try much harder to ensure that we've
> correctly waited for notification events, even in the
> scenario when cygwin thinks it has to terminate a thread due
> to the arrival of a signal. It is possible that the read has
> completed in that case and cygwin should not throw the data
> away since the read really *wasn't* terminated by a signal.
>
> Unfortunately, there is still a race here. I have an idea
> about how to fix the race but it would introduce a
> destabilizing change that I'd rather not chance before 1.5.13
> is released. Given that I can't reproduce the problem with
> the test script anymore, I think I'll release cygwin with
> this change plus any other potential fixes required to handle
> the "make -j" problem.
>
> cgf
>
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