Hey guys, (Initially I incorrectly posted this to the mono-list, so for those receiving this message twice, my apologies.)
I'm looking for a mono expert on the managed threading system, hopefully you can give me a pointer to where to look. The problem a couple of my users experience is that since linux kernel 4.1 mono crashes in a reproducible manner. (Using test case bug-18026 in a loop, which is a threadpool stress-test) A similar problem occurred in 3.13.0 but that was fixed by backporting some commits in the ubuntu kernel. (See https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=29212) Initially I believed that in 4.1 those commits were reverted, but tests indicated that wasn't the cause. So I did a full bisect on linux 4.0-4.1 on a 64-bit Ubuntu 14.04.2 Virtualbox. (~13 compiles of the kernel, took a couple of days) And it ended up on https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/c70e1b475f37f07ab7181ad28458666d59aae634 . The problem seems to cause NullReferenceException and possibly native SIGSEGVs in a variety of places. (I can dump some stacktraces if desired, but I suspect that won't be helpful coz the corruption is likely caused elsewhere.) To me it seems impossible that reading the tsc in any way could result in the nullrefs. So my guess would it a side-effect of the memory barrier. >From what I understand from the commit, the 'mfence+lfence' changed to 'mfence or lfence' (depending on what the cpu supports) and mfrence=lfence+sfence (not entirely true, but close), so I have no idea what the heck is going on there. But if I would venture a guess that somewhere, indirectly, mono unknowingly relies on that barrier to be there. Theoretically it still means other native apps could experience the same problem, but I would've expected reports about that already. My experience in these matters is pretty much non-existent. But dumping issues on devs is the least productive way to get them fixed, so I try to investigate as far as I can. Especially since it involves an issue that could be caused by either mono or the kernel. So my question is: Is there a likely candidate in mono where it uses the tsc (possibly for profiling) where the changed barrier could cause this odd behavior? And obviously, is there anything in particular I could try to narrow this down further? Almost forgot, but I did the bisect using mono 4.0.2.5, but I tested the nightly version as well. Thank you for your time. Taloth
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