[Xcb] libxcb/libX11 deadlocking and asserting in multi-threaded use

[Nicholas Allen]

Hi,

I completed the conversion to XCB ;-)

Unfortunately, the deadlocking problem is still there. It seems to
happen less frequently now but is still a problem.

What's the best way to debug this and get familiar with the XCB code?
Attaching to the process with a debugger and adding trace statements
shows that xcb_wait_for_event never returns (so it seems to be the same
problem as XNextEvent never returning).

Cheers,

Nick

Jamey Sharp wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 4:35 AM, Nicholas Allen
> <nick.allen at onlinehome.de> wrote:
>   
>>> By the way, you can always work around Xlib threading issues by using a
>>> mutex of your own to ensure that you never call Xlib from more than one
>>> thread at once. I'm told this was a common strategy even before
>>> Xlib/XCB.
>>>       
>> How would I call XNextEvent in this case? XNextEvent will block while
>> still holding my mutex so all other threads will also block until an
>> event arrives.
>>     
>
> True. I don't know how other people do it. There's the example of AWT,
> which requires all GUI operations to be done on the event thread, but
> somehow calls like SwingUtilities.invokeLater can wake up that thread
> while it's waiting for an event. Maybe they're using select/poll on
> the X connection's file descriptor rather than blocking in XNextEvent?
>
> Another hybrid option: port all of your event handling to XCB, but
> still use Xlib for other purposes. See XSetEventQueueOwner. Then you'd
> make Xlib calls from one thread at a time, but XCB calls including
> event handling from any thread. If there are bugs in XCB's thread
> support (and I'm pretty confident that code is correct) they should be
> much easier to track down and fix. Note that migrating event handling
> to XCB is all-or-nothing: if you do this, XNextEvent and friends will
> never return any events.
>
> I'm still not trying to weasel out of fixing the actual bug, but we've
> put a lot of work into these migration plans and I can't help
> encouraging people to use them. ;-)
>
> Jamey
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