[Openmcl-devel] Using suspend and resume (out of necessity)

[Florian Dietz]

Hello,

I am writing a multithreaded program that uses genetic programming 
techniques to construct new functions from existing building blocks. The 
purpose of this is to try to find heuristics to automatically generate 
code to solve simple problems. Due to the nature of this task, I do not 
have complete control over the code that some experimenting processes 
are going to run. It is even possible that they may start going into an 
infinite loop and there is nothing I can do to prevent that without 
making the technique less powerful (as per the halting-problem).

I want to be able to pause these experimenting processes from the 
outside (for prioritizing), but because I can't control what functions 
they are going to run I need to use process-suspend for this. I also use 
process-kill to stop them if I think they have hung up.

Unfortunately, there is a bug, but I think I know why:
Some of the building blocks of the constructed processes are critical 
sections that should not be interrupted. To prevent this, I put locks 
around them and make sure that before process-suspend or process-kill is 
called, all locks are acquired first. The problem with this is that, as 
I just realized, the functions process-suspend and process-kill may not 
wait until they have taken effect before returning. Is this correct? 
Because if it is, it is possible for my program to get into a deadlock 
in the following way:

The manager process acquires all locks, calls process-suspend and 
releases all locks again, but before the suspension actually takes 
effect. The target process now enters a critical section, acquiring a 
lock, but before it can leave the critical section again, the previously 
called suspension takes effect. I now have a suspended process holding a 
lock (is this actually possible or are locks automatically released on 
suspension?). The next time the manager process wants to suspend or 
resume a process, it will get stuck trying to acquire the lock that is 
being held by the suspended process.

A similar problem also applies to process-kill, because a process should 
not enter a critical section and then die so it never finishes all parts 
of the critical section.


Do you know if my suspicions where the bug is coming from are correct?
If so, how can I do this instead?


Best regards,
Florian Dietz