Hello, I have successfully built Python 3.8.1 on QNX, but ran into a problem when using 'make -j4'. The build process invariably hangs with multiple single-threaded child processes stuck indefinitely waiting on semaphores. These semaphores will clearly never be posted to, as the processes are all single threaded and the semaphores are not shared with any other process. A backtrace shows that the the offending calls come from run_at_forkers(), which is not surprising. I consider a multi-threaded fork() to be an ill-defined operation and my arch-nemesis... The problem here is that the value of the semaphore inherited from the parent shows the semaphore to be unavailable, even though the semaphore *object* itself is not the same as the one used by the parent (they share the same virtual address, but in different address spaces with different backing memory).
A few (noob) questions: 1. Is there a way to correlate the C backtrace from the core dump to the Python code that resulted in this hang? 2. It is well-known that a multi-threaded fork() is inherently unsafe, and POSIX says that no non-async-signal-safe operations are allowed between the fork() and exec() calls. I even saw comments to this effect in the Python source code ;-) So why is it done? 3. Any reason not to use posix_spawn() instead of fork()/exec()? While some systems implement posix_spawn() with fork()/exec() others (at least QNX) implements it without first creating a duplicate of the parent, making it both more efficient and safer in a multi-threaded parent. 4. thread_pthread.h seems to go to great lengths to implement locks without using native mutexes. I found one reference in the code dating to 1994 as to why that is done. Is it still applicable? Contrary to the claim in that comment the semantics for trying to lock an already-locked mutex and for unlocking an unowned mutex are well-defined. Thanks, --Elad _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/PTJ3UAZNYBYBYQ4WLMSERZR2XIVWISLM/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
