hyperthreading fix, try #1

Gary R. Van Sickle g.r.vansickle@worldnet.att.net
Tue Feb 8 08:44:00 GMT 2005


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@cygwin.com 
> [mailto:cygwin-owner@cygwin.com] On Behalf Of Christopher Faylor
> Sent: Monday, February 07, 2005 2:44 PM
> To: cygwin@cygwin.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
> 
> --
> Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
> Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
> Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
> FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
> 


--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/



More information about the Cygwin mailing list