Hi!
I don't know if that has been brought up before (I couldn't
find anything). libev reaps all child processess synchronously
in the default event loop. This behaviour can result in child
reaping race conditions, generally if waitpid() and in
particular if system() (declared in stdlib.h) is also used in
the program.
In single-threaded programs, this shouldn't cause any problem
because of the synchronous reaping. Even if children would
be reaped asynchronously, system() would block (mask out)
SIGCHLD temporarily.
However in multi-threaded environments, system() cannot
mask out SIGCHLD for every thread. I'm currently investigating
whether this is ok or a bug in itself. At least it happens with
both uClibc and glibc which use a similar system()
implementation (which call sigprocmask() for masking out
SIGCHLD...).
Of course it would be possible to reset the signal handler
after default loop initialization, but what if you still want
to use events for child reaping purposes? It would still be
possible to reap only the children you're actually interested
in or synchronize the waitpid() and system() calls with a
mutex. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be possible to
use an ev_signal for SIGCHLDs, maybe because libev uses an
ev_signal for child reaping internally!?
So the only way to not break the system() (and waitpid())
calls in a multi-threaded environment seems to be using
an async watcher. In pseudo-code:
ev_default_init(0);
ev_async_init(&async, async_cb);
ev_async_start(EV_DEFAULT_UC_ &async);
signal(SIGCHLD, chld_hnd);
...
void chld_hnd(int s) {
ev_async_send(EV_DEFAULT_UC_ &async);
}
...
void async_cb(EV_P_ ev_async *w, int revents) {
// do whatever we would have done in an ev_signal handler
}
That doesn't seem to be pretty much straight-forward.
IMHO, I could live without the ev_child watcher at all but
I would be happy with a clean way to use ev_signal to process
SIGCHLDs.
cheers,
Robin
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