[Haskell-cafe] Problems using Storable.poke* from separate OS thread.

[Lemmih]

On 1/21/07, Corey O'Connor <coreyoconnor at gmail.com> wrote:
> The short version: If a haskell routine exported to C is called from a
> CoreAudio IO Proc, which is on a separate thread than the main thread, the
> Haskell routine seams to exit early without notice.  If the same routine is
> called from the main thread the routine produces correct output. Any ideas
> on why Storeable.poke* would cause problems in this situation?
>
> The long version:
> I'm attempting to generate audio using Haskell and CoreAudio.* For a start I
> tried converting Noel Cragg's HAL sinewave demo to process the audio frames
> in Haskell. The original is here:
> http://www.red-bean.com/~noel/audio/hal-demo.c
>
> How CoreAudio HAL output works is like this:
> - A audio callback is registered with the audio device
> - Audio playback is started
> - A separate thread, dedicated to audio processing, will then call the audio
> callback with pre-allocated buffers to be filled out with audio samples.
>
> The test program has "main" in C and the audio callback in C. The C callback
> forwards to a Haskell routine exported by the FFI system. This routine
> should behave identically to the C implementation that already exists.
> However, the routine does not work correctly if called from the audio
> thread.
>
> The test program also calls the routine from the main thread in a manner
> that should be identical to how it's called from the thread. This is used to
> verify the Haskell callback does actually produce the same audio as the
> original C callback. So I know the code should work, but just fails for some
> inexplicable reason on the threaded callback.
>
> Other notes:
> - The program is compiled with -threaded and linked against the threaded
> RTS.
> - If I structure the routine like this:
>     ...
>     print "Before the audio is written to the buffer."
>     process_frames
>     print "After the audio is written to the buffer."
>
> The first print succeeds but the second print never occurs. No IO error is
> reported to try_.
> - If I take that same structure and remove "pokeElemAt" from process_frames.
> The second print occurs.
>
> I've uploaded the test program here:
> http://www.tothepowerofdisco.com/downloads/TestAudioOutput.zip
>
> Some notes on if you actually try to build it:
> - You have to build 3 times; There is a bug in XCode's custom build rule
> handling or the projects custom build rule.
> - The executable is wrapped in a app bundle but is actually a command line
> app.
> - It's a hack and I'm a beginner so comments are scarce and some code may be
> strange. ;-)
> - Assumes ghc 6.6 is installed to /usr/local

Do you have a smaller test case? I couldn't reproduce the error after
I pulled out the MacOS stuff.

-- 
Cheers,
  Lemmih