epicsThreadExitMain in softIoc program

[Benjamin Franksen <benjamin.franksen@helmholtz-berlin.de>]

Hi

I have finally found the reason why on linux in the sequencer 'make runtests'
occasionally hangs in between tests. The problem seems to be that my test
scripts start the program 'softIoc' from base with the -S option specifying
that it should not start an ioc shell (because it is supposed to run in the
background). In this case, the softIoc program calls epicsThreadExitMain. This
call turns the softIoc process into a zombie, which, occasionally, is also the
reason why such a process does no longer react to the usual signals except
SIGTERM (-9).

I think epicsThreadExitMain is supposed to save some resources; indeed,
without ioc shell the thread is no longer needed. However, since this seems to
have a lot of negative side effects, I propose to replace it with a simple
endless loop, something like

  while (1) {
    epicsThreadSleep(1.0);
  }

and to hell with the optimization.

I tried this, and it has *much* nicer behaviour: the process can be stopped
with Ctrl-C, it is no longer listed as zombie, and my runtests no longer hang
(on linux; the hangups on windows were caused by a bug in the sequencer that
have now fixed).

Cheers
Ben

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