Re: [musl] race condition in sem_wait

[Bobby Bingham <koorogi@koorogi.info>]

Sebastian Gottschall <s.gottschall@newmedia-net.de> writes:

> Hello
>
> i discovered recently a race condition while playing with threads and
> sem_wait/sem_post
> sem_wait may fail with errno set EAGAIN which is not valid since only
> sem_trywait is able to set that errno code.
> this was causing a bug with a later select() and accept() which failed
> since accept does not work if errno is set to EAGAIN.

Whether select/accept work or not should not be impacted by any existing
value in errno.

> from my point of view the bug is in sem_timedwait.c
>
>         if (!sem_trywait(sem)) return 0;
>
>         int spins = 100;
>         while (spins-- && sem->__val[0] <= 0 && !sem->__val[1]) a_spin();
>
>         while (sem_trywait(sem)) {
>
>
> the fist sem_trywait will fail with -1 and sets EAGAIN. but the second
> sem_trywait will not fail and does return 0. the problem now is that
> errno is still present and not reset.
> this may cause if sem_post is called from a second thread on the same
> semaphore.
> of course the same bug affects sem_timedwait itself.
> so i assume sem_wait is not thread safe which is bad and is not follow
> the posix specification

To quote POSIX [1]:

    The value of errno should only be examined when it is indicated to
    be valid by a function's return value. [...] The setting of errno
    after a successful call to a function is unspecified unless the
    description of that function specifies that errno shall not be
    modified.

If sem_wait() returns zero, then the value in errno after the call
returns is not meaningful in any way.

[1] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/errno.html

>
> or am i wrong here?
>
>
> Sebastian

Bobby