Re: [PATCH 5/6] co-shared-resource: protect with a mutex

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 10:59:40AM +0200, Emanuele Giuseppe Esposito wrote:
> co-shared-resource is currently not thread-safe, as also reported
> in co-shared-resource.h. Add a QemuMutex because co_try_get_from_shres
> can also be invoked from non-coroutine context.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Emanuele Giuseppe Esposito <eesposit@redhat.com>
> ---
>  util/qemu-co-shared-resource.c | 26 ++++++++++++++++++++++----
>  1 file changed, 22 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

Hmm...this thread-safety change is more fine-grained than I was
expecting. If we follow this strategy basically any data structure used
by coroutines needs its own fine-grained lock (like Java's Object base
class which has its own lock).

I'm not sure I like it since callers may still need coarser grained
locks to protect their own state or synchronize access to multiple
items of data. Also, some callers may not need thread-safety.

Can the caller to be responsible for locking instead (e.g. using
CoMutex)?

> diff --git a/util/qemu-co-shared-resource.c b/util/qemu-co-shared-resource.c
> index 1c83cd9d29..c455d02a1e 100644
> --- a/util/qemu-co-shared-resource.c
> +++ b/util/qemu-co-shared-resource.c
> @@ -32,6 +32,7 @@ struct SharedResource {
>      uint64_t available;
>  
>      CoQueue queue;
> +    QemuMutex lock;

Please add a comment indicating what this lock protects.

Thread safety should also be documented in the header file so API users
know what to expect.

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature