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Re: Question about the usage of pthread_mutex_t's __data.__lock


On 02/26/2015 04:08 PM, Martin Galvan wrote:
> Hi everyone! I'm currently writing the gdb pretty-printers for some of
> the NPTL types, as discussed here:
> 
> https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2015-02/msg00194.html
> 
> Right now I'm looking at the attributes of pthread_mutex_t, and I
> noticed __data.__lock is used to signal the mutex being locked (or
> not). For non-robust mutexes, according to sysdeps/nptl/lowlevellock.h
> __lock can have three different values:
> 
> 0: Not acquired.
> 1: Acquired with no waiters.
>> 1: Acquired, possibly with waiters.

Correct.

> Now, looking at __lll_lock_wait it seems that the ">1" value is
> actually just 2 (i.e. we can't have 3, 4, etc). Am I missing
> something, or should the comment be changed?

The specification is correct, but purposely vague, it likely comes
from a time when we didn't want to say that "2" was the only possible
value.

Adding Torvald to the TO:.

Torvald, Do you know of any reason why we wouldn't just document
in comments that 2 means `acquired, possibly with waiters` instead
of saying >1?

> Speaking of which, I've found a couple of small mistakes in some
> comments. For example:
> 
> while (atomic_exchange_acq (futex, 2) != 0)
>   lll_futex_wait (futex, 2, private); /* Wait if *futex == 2.  */
> 
> That comment seems wrong to me since we'll be waiting if *futex == 1 too.

I'll let Torvald answer that.

> I was thinking of sending a patch to correct these mistakes. We have a
> copyright assignment for gcc, gdb and binutils on the works; do we
> need a separate one for glibc as well? Since the changes are
> relatively small I don't think we need a copyright assignment for
> those, though.

For a few changes here and there you don't need copyright assignment,
roughly 11 lines is the metric we use to determine if you need one or not.
I would suggest getting one if you want to seriously contribute now and
in the future.

Cheers,
Carlos.


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