I should say a few words about futexes#

Wed, 19 Nov 2003 12:30:43 +0000

I should say a few words about futexes. Adding futex support to sbcl (using sys_futex, counting semaphores be damned) was mostly a straightforward job taking a couple of afternoons.

Unfortunately, it seems to have exposed a bug somewhere in GC handling or stopping-the-world issues around GC. GC itself is wrapped in a without-interrupts, which uses a mechanism very similar to pseudo-atomic to delay incoming signals: when the cleanup from without-interrupts detects that a signal was supposed to have happened, it calls int 3, and the SIGTRAP handler then runs the handler for the stored signal. At least, that's how it's supposed to work. Right now it looks like the kernel has decided that the SIGTRAP can't be delivered to the process in the normal fashion and instead it would be a good idea to SIGKILL all of our threads. This is probably some kind of stack corruption. Attaching a debugger to the right thread in the right place may be interesting.