Blocking behavior of synchronous calls

[Thiago Macieira]

Schmottlach, Glenn wrote:
>I have been studying the DBus implementation trying to gain a deeper
>understanding of the control flow through the library. In particular, it
>appears that the Glib binding implements synchronous calls (with
>timeouts) to remote services via dbus_connection_send_with_reply() and
>then blocks on dbus_pending_call_block().
>
>The comments in the code seem to indicate that dbus_pending_call_block()
>does not re-enter the mainloop or process other messages. If this is
>true, how does the message loop continue to process incoming signals and
>responses? Does the DBus library own a dedicated thread (e.g. mainloop)
>that polls/selects the transport file descriptors looking for incoming
>messages (and optionally) sending out-going messages if they're queued
>up? While a user's code is blocked on dbus_pending_call_block() can the
>DBus library still receive signals and dispatch them to registered
>callbacks? If that's possible, what would happen if a signal handler
>made a blocking call to a remote service? Would that block this main
>loop?

Hello Glenn

The D-Bus library does not have any particular threads. When any of the 
blocking functions are called (dbus_connection_send_with_reply_and_block 
or dbus_pending_call_block), the library will block on a select/poll on 
the file descriptor for the socket. That's the only event that will be 
processed. The function will pop any incoming messages from the bus and, 
if they're not the reply it's looking for, it will put them in a queue for 
later. Nothing will be dispatched.

Once the function returns, the application's main loop should call the D-
Bus library's functions for doing the dispatching of queued messages.

-- 
  Thiago Macieira  -  thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
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