• Vladislav Vaintroub's avatar
    Bug #42804 --parallel option does not work for MTR under ActiveState · 2943d2b7
    Vladislav Vaintroub authored
    perl 
    
    The problem here was the method how MTR gets its unique thread ids.
    Prior to this patch, the method to do it was to maintain a global 
    table of pid,mtr_unique_id) pairs. The table was backed by a text 
    file. The table was cleaned up one in a while and dead processes leaking
    unique_ids were determined with with kill(0) or with scripting tasklist
    on Windows.
    
    This method is flawed specifically on native Windows Perl. fork() is 
    implemented with starting a new thread, give it a syntetic negative PID
    (threadID*(-1)), until this thread creates a new process with exec()
    However,  neither tasklist nor any other native Windows tool can cope with
    negative perl PIDs. This lead to incorrect determination of dead process 
    and reusing already used mtr_unique_id.
    
    The patch introduces alternative portable  method of solving unique-id 
    problem. When a process needs a unique id in range [min...max], it just 
    starts  to open files named min, min+1,...max in a loop . After file is 
    opened, we do non-blocking flock(). When flock() succeeds, process has 
    allocated the ID. When process dies, file is unlocked . Checks for zombies 
    are not necessary.
    
    Since the change would create a co-existence problems with older version
    of MTR, because of different way to calculate IDs, the default ID range
    is changed from 250-299 to 300-349.
    
    Another fix that was necessary enable --parallel option was to serialize 
    spawn() calls on Windows. specifically, IO redirects needed to be protected.
    
    This patch also fixes hanging CRTL-C (as described in Bug #38629) for the
    "new"  MTR. The fix was already in 6.0 and is now downported.
    2943d2b7
Base.pm 5.01 KB