I have a C application using poll to wait for some data.
Currently I am implementing the rest of my application into this one and I use time based interrupts (SIGRTMIN). As expected poll() returns if one of my other timers call back.
How can I stop poll from doing that? I am reading a lot about ppoll(), but not sure how to use that... Can I use this to stop this function from returning when a timer event is fired?
(I do not have any problems with the poll being delayed a few ms)
If a thread / process blocking in poll() receives an unblocked signal then poll() will be interrupted. If you don't want that to happen then you can block the desired signal before calling poll(), and then unblock it after poll() returns (see sigprocmask()). Note, however, that that won't cause poll() to be delayed -- quite the opposite. If anything, it will cause receipt of the signal to be delayed. If poll() blocks long enough then it could cause multiple RT signals to queue up, so that after you unblock that signal you receive it multiple times in quick succession.
You should consider instead checking poll()'s return value (which you should always do anyway) and retrying if it is EINTR.
Related
is it necessary to check for errno == EINTR if you read massive amounts of data? I use the pread() function to read. In all my time I have never seen EINTR returned, but I have seen some code online where it is explicitely checks for it.
so really is it necessary to check for EINTR and maybe repeat the call?
EINTR is returned when as system call is interrupted as a result of your process receiving a signal. If your process was blocked in the kernel, waiting for the read to complete, and a signal is caught, this may wake the kernel; this depends on if the operation is interruptable. The sleeping I/O routine is woken and is expected to return EINTR to user-space.
Just before the kernel returns to user space, it checks for pending signals. If a signal is pending, it will take the action associated with that signal. Possible actions include: dispatching the signal to a signal handler, killing your process, or ignoring the signal. Assuming this does not kill your process and/or your signal handler returns normally, the system call will return EINTR.
If you were not expecting this, you typically want to try the action again, but this can also be used as a way to gracefully abort an I/O operation. For example, alarm(2) can be used to implement a timeout, where SIGALRM is delivered if the I/O does not complete in a timely manner. In your signal handler, you could set a flag indicating a timeout and when your read operation returns EINTR, you can check for your timeout flag.
The reason is - on a busy system, for example, it is possible to have an interrupt on the read.
So, on your desktop you may never see it. On an overloaded server, you can.
Se Chapter 5 of Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment - Stevens and Rago. There is a complete explanation.
I am writing code on ucLinux for socket communication. I use select() for reading the data on sockets. I also have a 20 msec timer (created using setitimer) running in the same thread for performing a parallel operation. My select function gets blocked each time saying "Interrupted by system call", since it receives the SIGALRM signal issue by the timer on overflow, every 20 msec. I tried restarting the system when EINTR is issued, and run select() again. but this wont help, since i will always receive the SIGALRM by timer every 20 msec. I dont want to ignore this signal since it is used for performing other tasks in the system, but i want to use select without being affected by this signal. Is there any way to handle this? I cannot use functions like timer_create() as these are not supported on the platform I am using. So, I am stuck up with using setitimerfor timer creation. Is there any way I can run both together independently in my code?
What you're doing is pretty weird. Let's face it: timers are an ancient and mostly-obsolete mechanism for doing work. Pretty much everyone these days avoids signals like the plague. There's essentially nothing useful you can do in a signal callback (you certainly can't call anything complicated like malloc for example), so you must have some way to get the timer notification back from the SIGALRM handler to the main thread already -- you're not actually doing the work in the signal handler are you?
So you have two tactics: use the standard self-pipe trick to turn the signal into an event on an fd, the "normal" way to handle things like SIGTERM, SIGINT and so on. You call socketpair or pipe to make a pipe, then write a byte into the pipe from the signal handler. You read the byte back from you select loop. You commonly write the value of the signal as the data, but you could write anything really.
The other tactic (much more sane) is to avoid the mess with signals and setitimer completely. setitimer is seriously legacy and causes problems for all sorts of things (eg. it can cause functions like getaddrinfo to hang, a bug that still hasn't been fixed in glibc (http://www.cygwin.org/frysk/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=15819). Signals are bad for your health. So the "normal" tactic is to use the timeout argument to select. You have a linked list of timers, objects you use to manager periodic events in your code. When you call select, you use as the timeout the shortest of your remaining timers. When the select call returns, you check if any timers are expired and call the timer handler as well as the handlers for your fd events. That's a standard application event loop. This way your loop code so you can listen for timer-driven events as well as fd-driven events. Pretty much every application on your system uses some variant on this mechanism.
Is an option for you doing something like this?
While(1) {
int rc = select(nfds, &readfds, &writefds, &exceptfds, &timeout);
if ((rc < 0) && (errno == EINTR) )
continue;
else {
// some instructions
}
}
If this is not an option for you you can probably use pselect which adds a parameter to the end (sigmask) which specifies a set of signals that should be blocked during the pselect(), see here
This is a question similar to Proper way to close a blocking UDP socket. I have a thread in C which is reading from a UDP socket. The read is blocking. I would like to know if it is possible to be able to exit the thread, without relying on the recv() returning? For example can I close the socket from another thread and safely expect the socket read thread to exit? Didn't see any high voted answer on that thread, thats why I am asking it again.
This really depends on what system you're running under. For example, if you're running under a POSIX-compliant system and your thread is cancelable, the recv() call will be interrupted when you cancel the thread since it's a cancel point.
If you're using an older socket implementation, you could set a signal handler for your thread for something like SIGUSR1 and hope nobody else wanted it and signal, since recv() will interrupt on a signal. Your best option is not to block, if at all possible.
I don't think closing a socket involved in a blocking operation is a safe guaranteed way of terminating the operation. For instance, kernel.org warns darkly:
It is probably unwise to close file descriptors while they may be in
use by system calls in other threads in the same process. Since a
file descriptor may be reused, there are some obscure race conditions
that may cause unintended side effects.
Instead you could use a signal and make recv fail with EINTR
(make sure SA_RESTART is not enabled). You can send a signal to a
specific thread with pthread_kill
You could enable SO_RCVTIMEO on the socket before starting the recv
call
Personally I usually try to stay clear of all the signal nastiness but it's a viable option.
You've got a couple of options for that. A signal will interrupt the read operation, so all you need to do is make sure a signal goes off. The recv operation should fail with error number EINTR.
The simplest option is to set up a timer to interrupt your own process after some timeout e.g. 30 seconds:
itimerval timer
timeval time;
time.tv_sec = 30;
time.tv_usec = 0;
timer.it_value = time;
if( setitimer( ITIMER_REAL, &timer, NULL ) != 0 )
printf( "failed to start timer\n" );
You'll get a SIGALRM after the specified time, which will interrupt your blocking operation, and give you the chance to repeat the operation or quit.
You cannot deallocate a shared resource while another thread is or might be using it. In practice, you will find that you cannot even write code to do what you suggest.
Think about it. When you go to call close, how can you possibly know that the other thread is actually blocked in recv? What if it's about to call recv, but then another thread calls socket and gets the descriptor you just closed? Now, not only will that thread not detect any error, but it will be calling recv on the wrong socket!
There is probably a good way to solve your outer problem, the reason you need to exit from a blocking UDP socket read. There are also several ugly hacks available. The basic approach is to make the socket non-blocking and instead of making a blocking UDP socket read, fake a blocking read with select or poll. You can then abort this loop several ways:
One way is to have select time out and check an 'abort' flag when select returns.
Another way is to also select on the read end of a pipe. Send a single byte to the pipe to abort the select.
If posix complient system, you can try to monitor your thread:
pthread_create with a function that makes your recv and pthread_cond_signal just after, then returns.
The calling thread makes a pthread_cond_timedwait with the desired timeout and terminates the called thread if timed_out.
I'm looking for a way to, from within a signal handler, conditionally interrupt a syscall that way taking place at the time the signal was handled. To make this concrete, suppose a call to read is in process, and SIGRT0 is received. This signal handler uses SA_RESTART because it does not want to unconditionally interrupt syscalls, but depending on a condition, I want to cause read to return EINTR immediately once the signal handler returns.
One way I could do this is by setting up another signal handler for SIGRT1, putting SIGRT1 in the signal mask for SIGRT0's handler, and omitting SA_RESTART from the SIGRT1 handler. Then the handler for SIGRT0 can raise SIGRT1, and when the first, non-interrupting signal handler returns, the second one will fire and read gets interrupted.
The problem with this solution is that other processes could send SIGRT1, causing unwanted EINTR occurrences.
Is there any way to achieve the result I'm looking for?
If you want to set a particular process to send that signal then you can any IPC techniques (e.g. pipe) to share its pid id and flags to make sure that signal was sent by that process. If signal wasn't sent by the process then just ignore it.
What I wanted was impossible for multiple reasons. Perhaps most importantly, the secondary signal that was intended to do the interrupting would potentially (and in reality on most systems) fire as soon as the first signal handler returned but before the interrupted syscall got restarted. Then the syscall would restart and continue to block.
Perhaps more importantly, any attempt to interrupt blocking syscalls with EINTR intentionally is subject to race conditions where the signal arrives just before the blocking syscall, but after whatever check would have prevented making the syscall due to having received the signal. The only time this might be acceptable is when you're prepared to fire off multiple signals with increasing delays between them until the "interupt request" is honored, but that's getting into the realm of flaky hacks...
Right now I have a function connected to SIGARLM that goes off after 1 second and will re-alarm itself to go off in another second everytime. There's a test in the logic of the SIGALRM function I wrote to see if a certain timeout has been reached and when it does I need it to kill a function that's running. Does anybody know how I can do this?
I forgot to mention: in the function that needs to be killed it waits on scanf() and the function needs to die even if scanf() hasn't returned yet.
One approach that might be worth looking into is using select to poll stdin and see if any data is ready. select lets you wait for some period of time on a file descriptor, controlling when you can be interrupted and by what, and seems like it's perfect here. You could just sit in a loop waiting for up to a second, then failing gracefully if no data is available. That way, SIGALRM wouldn't need to kill the function; it would take care of that all by itself.
Not sure exactly what you're asking or what the structure of the program is. If I understand correctly: some function is running and you want to terminate it if it's been running for X time. You have a SIGALARM wake up every second and that will check the running time of the other function and do the terminate.
How do you plan to kill the function? Is it a function in the same process, or is it a separate process. Is your question how to terminate it or how to tell when it needs to be terminated?
I've done something which I believe is similar. I had a multi-threaded application with a structure which contained information about the threads I wished to monitor. The structure contained a member variable "startTime". My monitoring (SIGALARM) function had access to a list of threads. When the monitor woke up it would traverse the list, compare current time to each thread startTime and send a message to the function if it had exceeded it's allowed runtime.
Does this help at all?
You could use a (global) variable to communicate between the signal handler and the function that should be stopped. The function then would check that variable to see if it should still continue running or if it should exit.
Something line this:
volatile int worker_expired = 0;
void worker() {
while (!worker_expired) {
// ...
}
}
void sig_alrm() {
worker_expired = 1;
}
If you want the signal to terminate IO operations, you need to make sure it's an interrupting signal handler. On modern systems, system calls interrupted by signals automatically restart unless you specify otherwise. Use the sigaction function rather than the signal function to setup your signal handlers if you want control over things like this. With sigaction, unless you specify SA_RESTART, signal handlers can interrupt.
If you're using file-descriptor IO functions like read, you should now get the effects you want.
If you're using stdio functions like fscanf, getting interrupted by a signal will put the FILE into an error state that can only be cleared by clearerr, and will lose any partial input in the buffer. Interrupting signals do not mix very well with stdio unless you just want to abort all operations on the file and close it when a signal is received.
So ... to restate slightly: it isn't so much that you want to kill the function as that you want any pending i/o to terminate and the function to exit.
I would either:
use select() to periodically wake up and check a flag set by the signal handler. if the flag isn't set and there's no input pending then loop and call select() again.
i suspect that your SIGALARM handler is doing more than just checking this one timer, and so using pselect() to check for i/o OR SIGALARM is probably not an option for you. i wonder if you could grab a user defined signal, and pass that in pselect. then your alarm handler would send that user defined signal.
Regarding choice 1, if SIGALARM is waking every second then you can adjust the time that select() sleeps to be within your maximum error latency. In other words assume that the timeout occurs immediately after the call to select(), then it will take until select() wakes up to detect the flag set by the SIGALARM handler. So if select() wakes up 10 times per second then it could take up to 1/10 second to detect the setting of the "give up" flag (set by the SIGALARM handler).