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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 355632dca928
children
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>Chapter 10. Audio</H1
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><B
>Table of Contents</B
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><DT
><A
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>SDL_AudioSpec</A
>&nbsp;--&nbsp;Audio Specification Structure</DT
><DT
><A
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>SDL_OpenAudio</A
>&nbsp;--&nbsp;Opens the audio device with the desired parameters.</DT
><DT
><A
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>SDL_PauseAudio</A
>&nbsp;--&nbsp;Pauses and unpauses the audio callback processing</DT
><DT
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>SDL_GetAudioStatus</A
>&nbsp;--&nbsp;Get the current audio state</DT
><DT
><A
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>SDL_LoadWAV</A
>&nbsp;--&nbsp;Load a WAVE file</DT
><DT
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>SDL_FreeWAV</A
>&nbsp;--&nbsp;Frees previously opened WAV data</DT
><DT
><A
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>SDL_AudioCVT</A
>&nbsp;--&nbsp;Audio Conversion Structure</DT
><DT
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>SDL_BuildAudioCVT</A
>&nbsp;--&nbsp;Initializes a SDL_AudioCVT structure for conversion</DT
><DT
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>SDL_ConvertAudio</A
>&nbsp;--&nbsp;Convert audio data to a desired audio format.</DT
><DT
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>SDL_MixAudio</A
>&nbsp;--&nbsp;Mix audio data</DT
><DT
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>SDL_LockAudio</A
>&nbsp;--&nbsp;Lock out the callback function</DT
><DT
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>SDL_UnlockAudio</A
>&nbsp;--&nbsp;Unlock the callback function</DT
><DT
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>SDL_CloseAudio</A
>&nbsp;--&nbsp;Shuts down audio processing and closes the audio device.</DT
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><P
>Sound on the computer is translated from waves that you hear into a series of 
values, or samples, each representing the amplitude of the wave.  When these
samples are sent in a stream to a sound card, an approximation of the original
wave can be recreated.  The more bits used to represent the amplitude, and the
greater frequency these samples are gathered, the closer the approximated
sound is to the original, and the better the quality of sound.</P
><P
>This library supports both 8 and 16 bit signed and unsigned sound samples,
at frequencies ranging from 11025 Hz to 44100 Hz, depending on the 
underlying hardware.  If the hardware doesn't support the desired audio
format or frequency, it can be emulated if desired (See 
<A
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>SDL_OpenAudio()</TT
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>)</P
><P
>A commonly supported audio format is 16 bits per sample at 22050 Hz.</P
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