"Nadav Har'El" <n...@cloudius-systems.com> writes:
> First of all, thanks. This indeed fixes the bug, and is exactly the first
> patch I tried to fix it this problem.
> I want to explain, though, why I ended up sending a different patch for
> this problem - a 4-line patch instead of this one-liner. The explanation is
> not very important, and I should probably have done this earlier, but
> perhaps someone would find it interesting.
> When the user types ^C, the operating system sends SIGINT to all processes
> belonging to the terminal's process group - and in particular it sends
> SIGINT to *both* the child compiler and ccache, separately.
> Your patch makes ccache exit as soon as it gets the SIGINT - but the child
> compiler might still be running for a while longer. This will usually be
> fine, but I thought the user can be surprised if he sees ccache (which he
> considers to be the compiler) exit, but "ps" shows the compiler is still
> running. This would be especially annoying if some hypothetical compiler
> trapped SIGINT deliberately, and continued to run long after ccache exits.
Actually, that's a bug not just a cosmetic problem, because it introduces
a race condition. Consider this sequence of events:
* make launches "ccache gcc -o test.o test.c"
* user types control-C
* ccache receives SIGINT and exits
* make does unlink("test.o") to clean up after failed compile step, which
it thinks is done
* gcc creates test.o
* gcc receives SIGINT and exits
We're left with a probably-broken test.o in the filesystem, despite
make's attempt to clean up. Now, the window for this is pretty narrow,
but I think it could happen: I don't believe that sending signals to
multiple processes is atomic in most kernels.
You really don't want ccache to exit until after all externally-observable
things have stopped happening. (I recently fixed a somewhat related bug
in Postgres :-(, which is why this caught my eye.)
regards, tom lane
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