On 2/14/12 03:51 , Felix Meschberger wrote:
Hi,

Am 13.02.2012 um 15:43 schrieb Richard S. Hall:

On 2/13/12 06:06 , Felix Meschberger wrote:
Hi,

I recently got a number of stacktraces, where a variable number of threads is blocked on 
"m_bundleLock.wait()" inside Felix.acquireBundleLock. From pure code 
inspection, it should not possible for the framework to stall there.

It seems that Guillaume Nodet also hit this problem and added code to throw an 
IllegalStateException if the wait() call is interrupted (FELIX-2784 [1]).

Other times I hit a similar issue in the Felix.acquireGlobalLock method for 
which I reported FELIX-3067 [2].

It looks like both lock acquisition methods are prone to some kind of deadlock. 
The acquireGlobalLock method has the ability to fail by reporting such failure 
with a return code. The acquireBundleLock has no ability to fail (except 
throwing an exception).

I think similar to my FELIX-3067 proposal the acquireBundleLock method should 
only wait a limited time and then retry acquiring the lock. Only if this fails 
for a number of times, acquisition should be aborted and the method fail with 
an IllegalStateException.

WDYT ?
The biggest issue I have is that these sorts of fixes simply address the
symptoms and may make it more difficult to figure out the root cause.
Understandably, these issues are notoriously difficult to reproduce...
Couldn't agree more.

Conceptually, the code should not allow deadlocks between bundle lock
acquirers and global lock acquirers, much like readers and writers. The
global lock (i.e., write lock) cannot be acquired if there are any
bundle lock holders (i.e., read lock).
Yes, but I have had a situation where three threads (FelixStartLevel starting 
bundles, FelixPackageAdmin refreshing bundles and an installer thread 
installing bundles (and configuration)). All three were contending for the same 
bundle lock without one of these obviously holding the global lock.

The result was a complete stand-still.

I will try to reproduce this issue and find out and come back with my findings.

That would be great, because technically, you shouldn't be acquiring more than one bundle lock at a time unless you are trying to promote to a global lock. Bundle locks are "one at a time", although there may be synchronous event situations that unknowingly violate this, so we should look to fix those if they exist.

-> richard


Regards
Felix

Bundle lock operations should only impact one bundle at time, of course,
this isn't always the case since synchronous event delivery introduces
some difficult here. All multiple bundle operations (e.g., resolves,
refreshes) must acquire the global. The only difficulty is that
sometimes you start off with a bundle lock and need to acquire the
global lock later because you didn't know in advance you would need the
global lock (e.g., starting a bundle and then determining you need to
resolve it or for resolving dynamic imports), in which case the bundle
lock needs to be promoted to a global lock, which leads to some
confusing code about trying to determine if there are cycles among
bundles trying to promote bundle locks.

Yeah, it's confusing and complicated, but still it would be better to
get a somewhat reproducible case and try to figure out if there is a
better solution than just introducing more error cases...

But if that's not possible, then we can do what we have to do...

->  richard

Regards
Felix

PS: We are still running 3.0.8 but the acquireBundleLock and acquireGlobalLock 
are the same as in trunk (except for Guillaume's FELIX-2784 fix).

[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FELIX-2784
[2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FELIX-3067

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