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.

.TH "SDL_JoyBallEvent" "3" "Tue 11 Sep 2001, 22:59" "SDL" "SDL API Reference" 
.SH "NAME"
SDL_JoyBallEvent \- Joystick trackball motion event structure
.SH "STRUCTURE DEFINITION"
.PP
.nf
\f(CWtypedef struct{
  Uint8 type;
  Uint8 which;
  Uint8 ball;
  Sint16 xrel, yrel;
} SDL_JoyBallEvent;\fR
.fi
.PP
.SH "STRUCTURE DATA"
.TP 20
\fBtype\fR
\fBSDL_JOYBALLMOTION\fP
.TP 20
\fBwhich\fR
Joystick device index
.TP 20
\fBball\fR
Joystick trackball index
.TP 20
\fBxrel\fR, \fByrel\fR
The relative motion in the X/Y direction
.SH "DESCRIPTION"
.PP
\fBSDL_JoyBallEvent\fR is a member of the \fI\fBSDL_Event\fR\fR union and is used when an event of type \fBSDL_JOYBALLMOTION\fP is reported\&.
.PP
A \fBSDL_JOYBALLMOTION\fP event occurs when a user moves a trackball on the joystick\&. The field \fBwhich\fR is the index of the joystick that reported the event and \fBball\fR is the index of the trackball (for a more detailed explaination see the \fIJoystick section\fR)\&. Trackballs only return relative motion, this is the change in position on the ball since it was last polled (last cycle of the event loop) and it is stored in \fBxrel\fR and \fByrel\fR\&.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.PP
\fI\fBSDL_Event\fR\fR, \fIJoystick Functions\fR, \fI\fBSDL_JoystickEventState\fP\fR, \fI\fBSDL_JoystickGetBall\fP\fR
...\" created by instant / docbook-to-man, Tue 11 Sep 2001, 22:59