Re: use of unsafe stdio _unlocked variants in multithreaded sort

[Pádraig Brady]

On 11/24/2013 01:13 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> While looking at the recent possible gettext() multithreaded issue,
> I also noticed that there were references to *_unlocked functions
> in the sort command, which doesn't look right.

Actually on further inspection the fread() is done from a single thread.
Also the fwrite()s can happen from separate threads, even to the same FILE*,
but there is higher level locking in place as the order of writes is quite
important to sort(1) :)

> So the remaining must be coming from gnulib:
> 
> $ (cd ~/git/gnulib/lib/ && grep unlocked-io.h *)
> argmatch.c:# include "unlocked-io.h"
> close-stream.c:# include "unlocked-io.h"
> error.c:# include "unlocked-io.h"
> exclude.c:# include "unlocked-io.h"
> getdelim.c:# include "unlocked-io.h"
> getndelim2.c:# include "unlocked-io.h"
> getpass.c:#  include "unlocked-io.h"
> getusershell.c:# include "unlocked-io.h"
> linebuffer.c:# include "unlocked-io.h"
> md2.c:# include "unlocked-io.h"
> md4.c:# include "unlocked-io.h"
> md5.c:# include "unlocked-io.h"
> mountlist.c:# include "unlocked-io.h"
> posixtm.c:# include "unlocked-io.h"
> readtokens.c:# include "unlocked-io.h"
> readutmp.c:# include "unlocked-io.h"
> sha1.c:# include "unlocked-io.h"
> sha256.c:# include "unlocked-io.h"
> sha512.c:# include "unlocked-io.h"
> version-etc.c:# include "unlocked-io.h"

> But I'd probably remove unlocked-io.h use from
> a few more of the top gnulib module list while at it?

So while some of the above mightn't need the unlocked variants
for performance, using unlocked IO does give a multithreaded program
more control through flockfile() over grouping separate stdio calls
to a particular descriptor. But...

> I wonder should we add a warning if USE_UNLOCKED_IO is 1
> while any of the gnulib threading modules are included?

... using unlocked I/O in multithreaded programs does
require some form of locking and so a gnulib warning stating
that would probably be appropriate. I'll look at adding that later.

thanks,
Pádraig.