... and now it's fixed

Next, the good news: I've found and fixed the bug, and committed the fix to the boost Subversion repository. If you can't update your boost implementation to trunk, you can download the new code and replace boost/thread/win32/condition_variable.hpp from the boost 1.35.0 distribution with the new version.

What was it?

For those of you interested in the details, this bug was in code related to detecting (and preventing) spurious wakes. When a condition variable was notified with notify_one(), the implementation was choosing one or more threads to compete for the notify. One of these would get the notification and return from wait(). Those that didn't get the notify were supposed to resume waiting without returning from wait(). Unfortunately, this left a potential gap where those threads weren't waiting, so would miss any calls to notify_one() that occurred before those threads resumed waiting.

The fix was to rewrite the wait/notify mechanism so this gap no longer exists, by changing the way that waiting threads are counted.

Posted by Anthony Williams
[/ threading /] permanent link
Tags: boost, thread, condition variable, windows
Stumble It! | Submit to Reddit | Submit to DZone

Comment on this post

If you liked this post, why not subscribe to the RSS feed or Follow me on Twitter? You can also subscribe to this blog by email using the form on the left.