[Haskell-cafe] fcntl locks, executeFile and threaded runtime

Donn Cave donn at avvanta.com
Mon Oct 28 20:42:55 UTC 2013


quoth Diego Souza,
...
> I ruled out executeFile as creating the lock prior forking makes the
> problem vanish.

Well, yes, but you'd expect this if there's a problem with executeFile,
wouldn't you?  Because here both locks are attempted prior to executeFile,
so it's kind of out of the picture.

It might be interesting to use a `sleeplock' as below that accepts a FD
parameter and attempts to lock it, and exec that from your Haskell main program.
Then you can verify (I think) that if you use that in your initial configuration
(where the parent locks second), it will always work when the exec'd program
does the lock, but maybe fail when it's done prior to the exec (same program
with no FD parameter.)

> Posix locks are hard to work with. Flock is much better, which is what I'm
> using now

For sure, I'll go along with that.  The operation of posix file locks should
be down to the kernel/filesystem/etc., though, so it seems to me, if it's
GHC's fault, the runtime must be doing something different to this fd at the
syscall level.  That's a fairly narrow set of possibilities.  If we rule that
out, and it really is something about thread scheduling etc., then it would
have to be a Linux bug, wouldn't it?

	Donn
------------
import System.IO
import System.Posix.IO
import System.Posix.Files
import System.Environment (getArgs)
import System.Posix.Unistd (sleep)

possiblyLock [] = return ()
possiblyLock (a:_) = do
      setLock (read a) (WriteLock, AbsoluteSeek, 0, 0)
      putStrLn "exec lock OK"

main = do
      args <- getArgs
      possiblyLock (tail args)
      sleep (read (head args))
      putStrLn "child waking up!"


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