[MLton] interrupted system call

Matthew Fluet fluet@cs.cornell.edu
Tue, 23 Aug 2005 14:08:38 -0400 (EDT)


> Your response seems to imply that my user level threads will never see 
> OS.syserr  where the error is interupted system call?

Correct; I believe that this is the behavior we want.

> In eXene there are a 
> few threads which have catch all handlers which simply exit the thread if any 
> exception is thrown. I have cased on these and found the exception they are 
> receiving is interupted system call, which you implied I should never see. 
> Should I allow this excpetion to propogate to the runtime, or is this a bug 
> and I should not even see this exception in my user defined handlers?

I'm tempted to call it a bug, though it will depend on the precise system 
call that is raising the exception.  The interrupted sys call exception 
should never be explicitly raised when the system call is to be restarted 
(see basis-library/posix/error.sml).

I can see a couple of different reasons that you might see the exception:
  1) the system call is being interrupted for some reason other than
     signals
  2) some system call in the Basis Library is not wrapped correctly by the
     restarting wrapper.

2) is the more likely explaination, so it would be desirable to figure out 
which system call is raising the error.  I believe
-const 'Exn.keepHistory true'  will work in a multi-threaded program, so 
if you just let the exception propagate to the top level, you should see a 
history that narrows down where the exception is coming from.

> I can write up a quick test for this, if this indeed is the problem, or 
> is it my error (exene) that the handler catches everything?

If you can come up with a test case, that would be great.

> On Mon, 22 Aug 2005, Matthew Fluet wrote:
>
>> 
>>> I would like to just confirm that all blocking system calls, in a 
>>> multi-threaded MLton compiled program, will infact yield an interrupted 
>>> system call exception upon context switching to a new thread due to timer 
>>> interupts?
>> 
>> Actually, we should be doing the opposite.  See the discussion at the 
>> bottom of
>>  http://mlton.org/MLtonSignal
>> 
>> You should, be default, not see exceptions from interrupted system calls; 
>> instead, the system calls will be silently restarted when the thread is 
>> resumed.
>> 
>>> I am mainly interested in socket calls. This is the behavoir I observe 
>>> when one thread atempts to read from a socket, blocks, and then the 
>>> program attempts to context switch to another thread.
>> 
>> That isn't the behavior I would expect from our stated philosophy on the 
>> web-page above.  Could you post the code that is yielding this behavior?
>> 
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