Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/2] Make simpletrace work on Windows

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 09/09/2011 11:37 AM, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> The 'simple' trace backend uses pthreads and does not work on Windows.  These
> patches switch from pthreads to glib so that the code builds on all platforms
> supported by glib.
>
> Only one thing I'm unhappy about: the simpletrace write-out thread used to
> block all signals.  I have removed that code and don't expect glib to do it for
> me.  I'm not sure if there is a problem if signal handlers are invoked in the
> write-out thread instead of a QEMU thread.  Any thoughts?

I am afraid of concurrent manipulation of the alarm timer info (in 
host_alarm_handler) if SIGALRM is triggered in the write-out thread. 
This would be with -clock unix.  I'd just leave the pthread_sigmask code 
#ifdef'ed in.

By the way, I think this is the exact problem that Windows has running 
with the dynticks timer instead of the mmsystem timer.  We can fix this 
particular problem by transferring host_alarm_handler's work to a bottom 
half, but in general I think leaving signals enabled is dangerous.

Paolo