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view README.Porting @ 3069:caefe2344f65
Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2007 07:38:25 +0000
From: John Bartholomew
Subject: [SDL] SDL Semaphore implementation broken on Windows?
Hi,
Over the past couple of days, I've been battling with SDL, SDL_Mixer and SMPEG to try to find an audio hang bug. I believe I've found the problem, which I think is a race condition inside SDL's semaphore implementation (at least the Windows implementation). The semaphore code uses Windows' built in semaphore functions, but it also maintains a separate count value. This count value is updated with bare increment and decrement operations in SemPost and SemWaitTimeout - no locking primitives to protect them.
In tracking down the apparent audio bug, I found that at some point a semaphore's count value was being decremented to -1, which is clearly not a valid value for it to take.
I'm still not certain exactly what sequence of operations is occuring for this to happen, but I believe that overall it's a race condition between a thread calling SemPost (which increments the count) and the thread on the other end calling SemWait (which decrements it).
I will try to make a test case to verify this, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to (threading errors being difficult to reproduce even in the best circumstances).
However, assuming this is the cause of my problems, there is a very
simple fix:
Windows provides InterlockedIncrement() and InterlockedDecrement()
functions to perform increments and decrements which are guaranteed to be atomic. So the fix is in thread/win32/SDL_syssem.c: replace occurrences of --sem->count with InterlockedDecrement(&sem->count); and replace occurrences of ++sem->count with InterlockedIncrement(&sem->count);
This is using SDL v1.2.12, built with VC++ 2008 Express, running on a
Core 2 duo processor.
| author | Sam Lantinga <slouken@libsdl.org> |
|---|---|
| date | Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:39:18 +0000 |
| parents | 103760c3a5dc |
| children |
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* Porting To A New Platform The first thing you have to do when porting to a new platform, is look at include/SDL_platform.h and create an entry there for your operating system. The standard format is __PLATFORM__, where PLATFORM is the name of the OS. Ideally SDL_platform.h will be able to auto-detect the system it's building on based on C preprocessor symbols. There are two basic ways of building SDL at the moment: 1. The "UNIX" way: ./configure; make; make install If you have a GNUish system, then you might try this. Edit configure.in, take a look at the large section labelled: "Set up the configuration based on the target platform!" Add a section for your platform, and then re-run autogen.sh and build! 2. Using an IDE: If you're using an IDE or other non-configure build system, you'll probably want to create a custom SDL_config.h for your platform. Edit SDL_config.h, add a section for your platform, and create a custom SDL_config_{platform}.h, based on SDL_config.h.minimal and SDL_config.h.in Add the top level include directory to the header search path, and then add the following sources to the project: src/*.c src/audio/*.c src/cdrom/*.c src/cpuinfo/*.c src/events/*.c src/file/*.c src/joystick/*.c src/stdlib/*.c src/thread/*.c src/timer/*.c src/video/*.c src/audio/disk/*.c src/audio/dummy/*.c src/video/dummy/*.c src/joystick/dummy/*.c src/cdrom/dummy/*.c src/thread/generic/*.c src/timer/dummy/*.c src/loadso/dummy/*.c Once you have a working library without any drivers, you can go back to each of the major subsystems and start implementing drivers for your platform. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask on the SDL mailing list: http://www.libsdl.org/mailing-list.php Enjoy! Sam Lantinga (slouken@libsdl.org)