pthread condition variables on Linux, odd behaviour.
- by janesconference
Hi.
I'm synchronizing reader and writer processes on Linux.
I have 0 or more process (the readers) that need to sleep until they are woken up, read a resource, go back to sleep and so on. Please note I don't know how many reader processes are up at any moment.
I have one process (the writer) that writes on a resource, wakes up the readers and does its business until another resource is ready (in detail, I developed a no starve reader-writers solution, but that's not important).
To implement the sleep / wake up mechanism I use a Posix condition value, pthread_cond_t. The clients call a pthread_cond_wait() on the variable to sleep, while the server does a pthread_cond_broadcast() to wake them all up. As the manual says, I surround these two calls with a lock/unlock of the associated pthread mutex.
The condition variable and the mutex are initialized in the server and shared between processes through a shared memory area (because I'm not working with threads, but with separate processes) an I'm sure my kernel / syscall support it (because I checked _POSIX_THREAD_PROCESS_SHARED).
What happens is that the first client process sleeps and wakes up perfectly. When I start the second process, it blocks on its pthread_cond_wait() and never wakes up, even if I'm sure (by the logs) that pthread_cond_broadcast() is called.
If I kill the first process, and launch another one, it works perfectly. In other words, the condition variable pthread_cond_broadcast() seems to wake up only one process a time. If more than one process wait on the very same shared condition variable, only the first one manages to wake up correctly, while the others just seem to ignore the broadcast.
Why this behaviour? If I send a pthread_cond_broadcast(), every waiting process should wake up, not just one (and, however, not always the same one).
