DBus threading question

[Thiago Macieira]

Schmottlach, Glenn wrote:
>Here's where the questions related to concurrency and thread-safety
>enter the picture. The worker thread loops (until the gQuit flag is set)
>and continuously makes synchronous (blocking) calls to toggle the play
>state of the media player. Based on my (limited) understanding of the
>logic, a synchronous method call causes the thread to poll/select on a
>socket descriptor waiting for a specific reply. If any signals (or
>unrecognized replies) arrive during this process they're placed on a
>queue to be process later. So this seems to imply that when the
>synchronous call is made from the worker thread, the "main" thread that
>called dispatcher.enter() is also polling/selecting on the same socket
>descriptor at the same time. This means that when a message does arrive
>both threads (the "main" and worker thread) are each vying to dispatch
>the message. Is this the correct interpretation of what is going on
>internally?  How is the message handling arbitrated? What happens if the
>"main" thread retrieves the expected reply message that the worker
>thread is waiting on?

A blocking call keeps the transport locked for the entire duration of the 
process. That means no other thread can dispatch that connection while the 
blocking call is in progress. The blocking call function will keep the 
lock until it receives the reply it wants, or until a timeout happens. 
Meanwhile, if any messages are received which are uninteresting for it, 
the function queue them up for dispatching later -- for another function.

Conclusions:

1) there's no race condition like you describe, because the worker thread 
has the priority

2) if the worker thread takes too long to finish (like a call without a 
reply -- takes 25 seconds), everything else is blocked.

-- 
  Thiago Macieira  -  thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
    PGP/GPG: 0x6EF45358; fingerprint:
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