view docs/html/guidebasicsinit.html @ 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 355632dca928
children
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>Initializing SDL</H1
><P
>SDL is composed of eight subsystems - Audio, CDROM, Event Handling, File I/O, Joystick Handling, Threading, Timers and Video. Before you can use any of these subsystems they must be initialized by calling <A
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><TT
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>SDL_Init</TT
></A
> (or <A
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><TT
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>SDL_InitSubSystem</TT
></A
>). <TT
CLASS="FUNCTION"
>SDL_Init</TT
> must be called before any other SDL function. It automatically initializes the Event Handling, File I/O and Threading subsystems and it takes a parameter specifying which other subsystems to initialize. So, to initialize the default subsystems and the Video subsystems you would call:
<PRE
CLASS="PROGRAMLISTING"
>    SDL_Init ( SDL_INIT_VIDEO );</PRE
>
To initialize the default subsystems, the Video subsystem and the Timers subsystem you would call:
<PRE
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>    SDL_Init ( SDL_INIT_VIDEO | SDL_INIT_TIMER );</PRE
></P
><P
><TT
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>SDL_Init</TT
> is complemented by <A
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>SDL_Quit</TT
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> (and <A
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>SDL_Quit</TT
> shuts down all subsystems, including the default ones. It should always be called before a SDL application exits.</P
><P
>With <TT
CLASS="FUNCTION"
>SDL_Init</TT
> and <TT
CLASS="FUNCTION"
>SDL_Quit</TT
> firmly embedded in your programmers toolkit you can write your first and most basic SDL application. However, we must be prepare to handle errors. Many SDL functions return a value and indicates whether the function has succeeded or failed, <TT
CLASS="FUNCTION"
>SDL_Init</TT
>, for instance, returns -1 if it could not initialize a subsystem. SDL provides a useful facility that allows you to determine exactly what the problem was, every time an error occurs within SDL an error message is stored which can be retrieved using <TT
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>SDL_GetError</TT
>. Use this often, you can never know too much about an error.</P
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>Example 1-1. Initializing SDL</B
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><PRE
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>#include "SDL.h"   /* All SDL App's need this */
#include &#60;stdio.h&#62;

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
    
    printf("Initializing SDL.\n");
    
    /* Initialize defaults, Video and Audio */
    if((SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_VIDEO|SDL_INIT_AUDIO)==-1)) { 
        printf("Could not initialize SDL: %s.\n", SDL_GetError());
        exit(-1);
    }

    printf("SDL initialized.\n");

    printf("Quiting SDL.\n");
    
    /* Shutdown all subsystems */
    SDL_Quit();
    
    printf("Quiting....\n");

    exit(0);
}&#13;</PRE
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