[Openmcl-devel] forking to dump?

[Hans Hübner]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 08:44, Tobias C. Rittweiler <tcr at freebits.de> wrote:

> So what's the locking problem Gary is talking about? (I could imagine
> that the copied states of condition variables etc. may cause problems
> when loading the image back in, and trying to get the image working
> again; but Gary seems to be talking about locking problems prior to
> dumping.)

I think Gary refers to locks that are internal to CCL and might be
held by another thread at the point in time when the fork was
executed.  Lacking knowledge of the internals involved, I can only
speculate that he is talking about garbage collector or stream locks.

If the application manages to make all running threads synchronize
before the initial thread performs the fork, the child process should
be safe.  This may be possible for some applications (like mine) which
can tolerate the brief halt of processing required to synchronize
before the fork.

-Hans