Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson via Core-talk <[email protected]> · Mon, 06 May 2019 20:25:36 -0000

Review: Needs Fixing

RTEMS and VxWorks both use the same basic implementation of epicsThreadPrivate variables for which the delete function does nothing:

> void epicsThreadPrivateDelete (epicsThreadPrivateId id)
> {
>     /* empty */
> }

I thought that we used this code everywhere, (I'd forgotten that we even provided a Delete() function for the API) but I was obviously wrong; both the Posix and Windows implementations /are/ different and rely on the OS to allocate IDs. On Posix reusing a pthread_key_t value after deleting it results in undefined behavior, but I suspect that in practice the storage in any other threads doesn't get deleted immediately, which is why Bruno's test worked.

The rationale section in the Linux pthread_key_delete() man-page describes how fraught with difficulty deleting the ID/key of a thread-private variable is in practice, and in Base most code doesn't delete the ID at all. Both the 3.15 and 7.0 branches contain 10 calls to epicsThreadPrivateCreate() and only 2 calls to epicsThreadPrivateDelete(), one of which is in the destructor for the C++ epicsThreadPrivate<T> template class (which only seems to be used in test programs), the other is here in CA's cacExitHandler().

I agree with Michael that removing the cacExitHandler() is probably the best solution. My previous commit already added a Release Note, the wording of which still applies, so it would make sense to modify this merge to finish off the necessary changes.
-- 
https://code.launchpad.net/~info-martin-konrad/epics-base/+git/epics-base/+merge/366996
Your team EPICS Core Developers is subscribed to branch epics-base:3.15.

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System