[vlc-devel] Re: vlc: svn commit r19402 (fenrir)

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le samedi 24 mars 2007 02:09, Laurent Aimar a écrit :
> > I am not convinced this is correct at all. Which signals is causing
> > a problem? polls are not supposed to be interrupted in the first
> > place, or there is likely a bug somewhere else. Eating up a signal
> > silently is plain wrong.
>
> Well from man poll:
>
> The poll() function will fail if:
> [..]
>      EINTR A signal was caught during the poll() function.

I did not say this cannot happen in the general case. But VLC blocks 
signals it handles, so they cannot occur during poll() - or anything 
else for that matter. The remaining ones will either crash the program 
(so they poll won't have a chance to return) or be ignored (in which 
case poll() ought not to be interrupted AFAIK).

Another possibility lies in some libraries installing its own signal 
handlers (X11 output?), or that our signal mask is incomplete. But 
then, the signals ought to be delivered to the thread running that 
library, not to another random thread doing network I/O (and well, 
libraries should never install signal handlers anyway). Then, eating up 
EINTR in poll() is likely merely a work-around for a bug lying 
somewhere else.

> And on my computer it happens (not that often but ...)

Which signal?

> I haven't used poll very much but for it seems similar to select man
> page. For select we handle it and I am sure it is needed.

Yeah, signal handling semantics are identical with select() and poll(). 
Which is to say a broken/racy handling, unless signals are completely 
blocked. The reason for switching to poll was support for more than 
FD_SETSIZE open files, where FD_SET silently causes a buffer overflow.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/vlc-devel/attachments/20070324/3f80a1fc/attachment.sig>