We have a small daemon application written in C for a couple of various UNIX platforms (this problem is happening in SunOS 5.10), that basically just opens up a serial port and then listens for information to come in via said port.
In this particular instance, the daemon appears to read a single transmission (like a file's worth of data) sent over via the serial port, then it receives a SIGINT. This happens every time. Other customers use this setup very similarly without receiving the SIGINT. Quite obviously, the users are NOT pressing Ctrl-C. We have a relatively simple signal handler in place, so we definitely know that that is what is happening.
What else could possibly be causing this? Googling around and looking through the questions here, I couldn't find much explanation as to other things that could cause a SIGINT. I also looked through the code and found no calls to raise() and only a single call to kill(pid, 0) which wouldn't send a SIGINT anyway.
Any thoughts or insight would definitely be appreciated.
If you do not want the serial port to become the controlling terminal for the process, open it using the open flag O_NOCTTY. If it is the controlling terminal, data from the serial port may be interpreted as an interrupt or other special character.
You didn't say how your signal handler is attached, but if you're able to attach it using sigaction(2) so as to get a siginfo_t then it looks like that would include the pid that sent the signal (si_pid).
I found an interesting blog post about debugging a problem with similar symptoms. While I doubt it's the same issue, it's got some very useful debugging tips for tracing the origin of signals.
Related
I've made a test C program that creates an AF_PACKET socket, creates x amount of threads via pthreads, and within each thread performs epoll on the socket's file descriptor. This program was made for Linux and I've compiled it using GCC on Ubuntu 18.04. I've submitted a GitHub Gist of the program here since it's 200+ lines of code. I am still fairly new to C and network programming. Therefore, I'm sure there are many improvements I can make to the code. I am open to suggestions!
I have two main questions:
Is there a better way to receive and process high amounts of packets/traffic in a user space program than the above? I've read using pthreads along with epoll would be the best option, but I've also looked into select and standard poll.
When the program above is executed without any debug output via fprintf(), each thread consumes 100% CPU on the epoll_wait() function within the while loop. Is this normal behavior or am I using epoll incorrectly? I've looked at some other examples and I use epoll the same way as the examples do. I've taken a look at the manual page for epoll and I believe I'm using it correctly in my case. I've also tried setting a timeout for the epoll_wait() function, but it was still consuming 100% CPU per thread (which I'd expect due to the while loop).
I plan to make a program that will redirect traffic after inspecting the traffic and I expect a lot of incoming packets which is why I wanted to see if there is a better way to receive and process high amounts of packets. I also understand I could just use standard SOCK_DGRAM or SOCK_STREAM sockets and bind them to an IP and port. However, I do want to process and inspect all incoming traffic to an interface and forward traffic if necessary (e.g. if the destination address matches a forwarding rule). I also wasn't sure if I should make multiple sockets in this case (perhaps a socket per thread). I did do this initially, but it resulted in unexpected behavior and it was only ever reading from one socket descriptor anyways. Perhaps I wasn't creating the new sockets properly.
Any help is highly appreciated and if you need any more information, please let me know.
Thank you for your time.
I'm not sure how to go about handling asynchronous tasks in a program I am writing and I'm hoping someone more experienced can at least point me in the right direction.
I'm running Angstrom Linux on an embedded ARM processor. My program controls several servos through exposed hardware PWM and a camera over PTP. Additionally it is socket daemon which takes commands from an arbitrary client (Android in this instance). The camera PTP is slow, and I don't want to wait around for it to finish its task because the rest of the program needs to be responsive.
I've tried threads, but any problems in the camera thread seems to kill the whole process. Ideally I want to send the camera off on its own to do its thing and when it is finished let the main function know. Is this an appropriate forking technique or have I implemented threading improperly?
Additionally, I would like to stay away from large secondary libraries to avoid any more cross compiling issues then I already have. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Your problem sounds like a classic case for multiple processes, communicating with inter-process communications (IPC) of some sort.
The camera should have its own process, and if that process dies, the main process should not have a problem. You could even have the init(8) process manage the camera process; that can automatically restart the process if it dies for any reason.
You could set up a named pipe permanently, and then the camera process could re-open it any time it restarts after failure.
Here is some documentation about named pipes:
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/lpg/node15.html
I found this from the Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_pipe
I searched StackOverflow and found a discussion of named pipes vs. sockets:
IPC performance: Named Pipe vs Socket
Take the basic method of steveha's answer but skip the init(8) and named pipes.
fork() a child containing your camera code and communicate through regular pipes or domain sockets. Code a signal handler for SIGCHLD in the parent.If the child dies interrogate the reasons why with the return code from wait(). If it died on its own then cleanup and restart it; if it ended normally do what is appropriate in that case. Communicate with the child through whichever IPC you end up choosing. This give you more control over the child than init and domain sockets or pipes, in particular, will make it easier to set up and communicate between parent and child than messing with the funky semantics of FIFOs.
Of course, if there is really problems with the camera code all you have really done is make the failures somewhat more manageable by not taking down the whole program. Ideally you should get the camera code to work flawlessly if that is within your power.
I've tried threads, but any problems in the camera thread seems to kill the whole process.
When you say kill the whole process, what actually happens?
I put it to you that you are better off debugging the above problem, than trying to wrap the bug away in a forked process. You would rather have a reliable system including a reliable camera, than a reliable core system with an unreliable camera.
I am writing a simple instant messenger program in C on Linux.
Right now I have a program that binds a socket to a port on the local machine, and listens for text data being sent by another program that connected to my local machine IP and port.
Well, I can have this client send text data to my program, and have it displayed using stdout on my local machine; however, I cannot program a way to send data back to the client machine, because my program is busy listening and displaying the text sent by the client machine.
How would I go about either creating a new process (that listens and displays the text sent to it by the client machine, then takes that text and sends it to the other program's stdout, while the other program takes care of stdin being sent to the client machine) or create 2 programs that do the separate jobs (sending, receiving, and displaying), and sends the appropriate data to one another?
Sorry if that is weirdly worded, and I will clarify if need be. I looked into exec, execve, fork, etc. but am confused as to whether this is the appropriate path to look in to, or if there is a simpler way that I am missing.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, Thank you.
EDIT: In retrospect, I figured that this would be much easier accomplished with 2 separate programs. One, the IM server, and the others, the IM clients.
The IM Clients would connect to the IM server program, and send whatever text they wanted to the IM server. Then, the IM server would just record the data sent to it in a buffer/file with the names/ip's of the clients appended to the text sent to it by each client, and send that text (in format of name:text) to each client that is connected.
This would remove the need for complicated inter-process/program communication for stdin and stdout, and instead, use a simple client/server way of communicating, with the client programs displaying text sent to it from server via stdout, and using stdin to send whatever text to the server.
With this said, I am still interested in someone answering my original question: for science. Thank you all for reading, and hopefully someone will benefit from my mental brainstorming, or whatever answers come from the community.
however, i cannot program a way to send data back to the client machine, because my program is busy listening and displaying the text sent by the client machine.
The same socket that was returned from a listening-socket by accept() can be used for both sending and receiving data. So your socket is never "busy" just because you're reading from it ... you can write back on the same socket.
If you need to both read and write concurrently, then share the socket returned from accept() across two different threads. Since two different buffers are being used by the networking stack for sending and receiving on the socket, a dedicated thread for reading and another dedicated thread for writing to the socket will be thread-safe without the use of mutexes.
I would go with fork() - create a child process and now you have two different processes that can do two different things on two different sockets- one can receive and the other can send. I have no personal experience with coding a client/server like this yet, but that would be my first stab at solving your issue...
As #bdonlan mentioned in a comment, you definitely need a multiplexing call like select or preferably poll (or related syscalls like pselect, ppoll ...). These multiplexing calls are the primitive to wait on several channels at once (with pselect and ppoll able to atomically wait for both I/O events and signals). Read also the select tutorial man page. Of course, you can wait for several file descriptors, and you can wait for both reading & writing abilities (even on the same socket, if needed), in the same select or poll syscall.
All event-based loops and frameworks are using these multiplexing calls (like poll or select). You could also use libevent, or even (particularly when coding a graphical user interface application) some GUI toolkit like Gtk or Qt, which are all based around a central event loop.
I don't think that having a multi-process or multi-threaded application is useful in your case. You just need some event loop.
You might also ask to get a SIGIO signal when data arrives on your socket using fcntl with F_SETOWN, but this is not very useful for you. Then you often want to have your socket non-blocking.
I have designed a message passing interface in c which is used to provide communication between different processes running in my system. This interface creates 10-12 threads for its purpose and use TCP sockets to provide communication.
It is working fine but sometimes it receives signal SIGTERM. Can anyone please tell me why is it receiving this signal.
If a human isn't killing your process, then the kernel is.
This can happen when a machine is trying to save itself from drowning (you've used up all the memory/swap/resources). Might want to look at what's going on on that system when your process is running.
I have a TCP Svr process written in C and running on CentOS 5.5. It acts as a TCP Server for external clients and also does some IPC communication with other processes in the system using Unix Domain Sockets it has establised. It's not a multi threaded process. It does one task at a time. There's an epoll_wait() I use to listen for requests on either the TCP socket or any of the IPC sockets it has established with internal processes. When the epoll_wait() function breaks,I process the request for whoever it is and then go back into epoll_wait()
I have a TCP Client that connects to this Process from outside (not IPC). It connects sucessfully, sends a request msg, gets a response back. I've put this in an infinite loop
just to test out its robustness etc.
After a while, the TCP Server stops responding to requests coming from TCP Client. The TCP client connects successfully, sends a request message, but it doesnt get any response msg back from the TCP server.
So I reckon the TCP server is stuck somewhere else, trying to do something and has not returned to the epoll_wait() to process
other requests coming in. I've tried to figure it out using logs, but thats not helping me understand where exactly the process is stuck.
So I wanted to use any debugger that can give me some information (function name would be great), as to what the process is doing. Putting breakpoints, is overwhelming cause the TCP Server process has tons of files and functions....
I'm trying to use DDD on CentOS 5.5, to figureout whats going on. I attach to the process successfully. Then I click on "Step" or "Stepi" or "Next" button....
but nothing happens....
btw when I use Eclipse for debugging, and attach to this process (or any process), I always get "__kernel_vsyscall()"....Does this mean, the program breaks by default at
whatever its doing? If thats the case, how do I come out of the __kernel_vsyscall() call, to continue within my program? If I press f8, it comes out, but then I dont know where it was, since I loose the stack trace....Like I said earlier. Since I cant figure where it was, I dont know where to put breakpoint....
In summary, I want to figureout where my process is stuck or what its doing and try to debug from that point on....
How do I go about this?
Thanks
Amit
1) Attaching to a C process can often cause problems in itself, is there any way for you to start the process in the debugger?
2) Using the step functions of DDD need to be done after you've set a breakpoint and the program is stopped on a command. From reading your question, I'm not sure you've done that. You may not want to set many breakpoints, but is setting one or two in critical sections of code possible?
In summary, What I wanted to accomplish was to be able to find where my program is stuck, when it hangs. I figured it out - It was so simple. Create a configuration in Eclipse ...."Debug Configurations->C/C++ attach to application"...
Let the process run normally from shell (preferably with a terminal attached). When it hangs, open eclipse, click on the debug icon and run the configured process. It'll ask you to attach to a process. Look for your process name and attach to it.
Now, just look at the entire stack trace....you'll see some of your own function calls mixed with kernel function calls. That tells you where the program is stuck.