Re: GNUstep lock issues

[Riccardo Mottola]

On 2016-02-28 10:36:25 +0100 Richard Frith-Macdonald 
<address@hidden> wrote:

> > On 28 Feb 2016, at 09:20, Riccardo Mottola 
> > <address@hidden> 
> > wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I experience lately problems with "someone broke our lock" issues 
> > and other 
> > Lock related exceptions.
> > I have experienced this on NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux, clang or gcc, 
> > it is 
> > not OS nor compiler dependant. It happens on plain uniprocessor 
> > computers.
> >
> > I know that Gregory had some issues too. Greg, maybe you can add 
> > information?
> >
> > Usually the nuiseance happens when launching a GS application when 
> > one is 
> > already running (e.g. one runs Terminal or GWorkspace and launches 
> > application X).
> > I think that latley it is happening really a lot.
> > The most common thing is that you canot start an application and get 
> > a 
> > popup. Retrying a couple of time helps.
> > Sometimes, like what happened just to me, you leave things running 
> > and get 
> > back to the computer and found one app died leaving that in the 
> > console.
> >
> > Maybe writing defaults is related, but it could be something related.
> >
> > It surely makes using more apps and thus having a Desktop quite have 
> > a bad 
> > thing now. I think we need to dig it out before release. The issue 
> > is... I 
> > have no way to reliably reproduce that
>
> It sounds like you are probably talking about filesystem locks 
> (inter-process) rather than processor (inter-thread) locks.
> NSUserDefaults uses NSDistributedLock to ensure that only one process 
> updates 
> the persistent defaults at a time, so you could try looking there.
> If I'm to look into it under debug, I really do need at least a way 
> to 
> reproduce the problem though.

I started GWorkspace and saw this:

/System/Tools/fswatcher: Uncaught exception NSGenericException, 
reason: Unable to get attributes of lock file we made

Then I started GNUMail (to report hits error) and saw this:

Warning ... someone broke our lock 
(/home/multix/GNUstep/Defaults/.lck/.GNUstepDefaults.lck) ... and may 
have interfered with updating defaults data in file.201

Does this give you any ideas? This is on NetBSD/x86/clang it happens 
often, but not always...


Riccardo