Dbus pthread mutex lock race condition.

Jaikumar Ganesh jaikumarg at gmail.com
Wed Dec 14 21:16:31 PST 2011


Folks,
    There is a race condition in the basic pthread mutex lock code for dbus.

Thread 1:
   Calls _dbus_connection_acquire_io_path -> grabs the mutex ->
 io_path_acquired = true -> releases the mutex -> exits the function.

Thread 2:
   Calls _dbus_connection_acquire_io_path -> grabs the mutex
-> io_path_acquired is already true -> _dbus_condvar_wait_timeout

Thread 1:
   Calls _dbus_connection_release_io_path -> grabs the mutex -> sets
io_path_acquired = false -> signals thread 1 and releases the mutex.

    Calls _dbus_connection_acquire_io_path again tries to grab the mutex.


Now, in _dbus_pthread_condvar_wait_timeout:

     result = pthread_cond_timedwait (&pcond->cond, &pmutex->lock,
&end_time);
    ......
  _dbus_assert (pmutex->count == 0);
  pmutex->count = old_count;
  pmutex->holder = pthread_self();


We set the holder back to Thread 2 only after some time.
During this time Thread 1 can grab the mutex since pthread->holder is still
set to Thread1.  In _dbus_pthread_mutex_lock function
that check is enough to grab the lock.

So currently, Thread 2 has woken up from cond_timewait -> gone back to the
acquire_io_path_function and set io_path_acquired to true.

Thread 1, has been able to grab the mutex -> checks io_path_acquired
variable, sees that it already true -> calls condvar_wait_timeout.

which asserts that the pthread->holder and pthread_self is the same. This
assert will fail.

Hope the above make sense. The attached patch fixes the problem for me.

Thanks
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