pthreads in C - pthread_exit

Question

For some reason I thought that calling pthread_exit(NULL) at the end of a main function would guarantee that all running threads (at least created in the main funct

Answer 1

A mini saga

You don't mention the environment in which you are running the original code. I modified your code to use nanosleep() (since, as I mentioned in a comment to the question, sleep() takes an integer and therefore sleep(0.2) is equivalent to sleep(0)), and compiled the program on MacOS X 10.6.4.

Without error checking

It works fine; it took about 100 seconds to run with the 0.5 probability factor (as you'd expect; I changed that to 0.05 to reduce the runtime to about 10 seconds), and generated a random string - some of the time.

Sometimes I got nothing, sometimes I got more and sometimes I got less data. But I didn't see a core dump (not even with 'ulimit -c unlimited' to allow arbitrarily large core dumps).

Eventually, I applied some tools and got to see that I always got 1025 characters (1024 generated plus a newline), but quite often, I got 1024 ASCII NUL characters. Sometimes they'd appear in the middle, sometimes at the beginning, etc:

$  ./pth | tpipe -s "vis | ww -w64" "wc -c"
    1025
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000ocriexffwgdvdvyfitjtvlzcoffhusjo
zyacniffpsfswesgrkuxycsubufamxxzkrkqnwvsxcbmktodessyohixsmuhdovt
hhertqjjinzoptcuqzertybicrzaeyqlyublbfgutcdvftwkuvxhouiuduoqrftw
xjkgqutpryelzuaerpsbotwyskaflwofseibfqntecyseufqxvzikcyeeikjzsye
qxhjwrjmunntjwhohqovpwcktolcwrvmfvdfsmkvkrptjvslivbfjqpwgvroafzn
fkjumqxjbarelbrdijfrjbtiwnajeqgnobjbksulvcobjkzwwifpvpmpwyzpwiyi
cdpwalenxmocmtdluzouqemmjdktjtvfqwbityzmronwvulfizpizkiuzapftxay
obwsfajcicvcrrjehjeyzsngrwusbejiovaaatyzouktetcerqxjsdpswixjpege
blxscdebfsptxwvwsllvydipovzmnrvoiopmqotydqaujwdykidmwzitdsropguv
vudyfiaaaqueyllnwudfpplcfbsngqqeyucdawqxqzczuwsnaquofreilzvdwbjq
ksrouwltvaktpdrvjnqahpdqdshmmvntspglexggshqbjrvxceaqlfnukedxzlms
cnapdtgtcoyhnglojbjnplowericrzbfulvrobfn
$

(The 'tpipe' program is like 'tee' but it writes to pipes instead of files (and to standard output unless you specify the '-s' option); 'vis' comes from 'The UNIX Programming Environment' by Kernighan & Pike; 'ww' is a 'word wrapper' but there aren't any words here so it brute force wraps at width 64.)

The behaviour I was seeing was highly indeterminate - I'd get different results on each run. I even replaced the random characters with the alphabet in sequence ('a' + i % 26), and was still getting odd behaviour.

I added some debug printing code (and a counter to the contex), and it was clear that the semaphore context->full was not working properly for the reader - it was being allowed to go into the mutual exclusion before the writer had written anything.

With error checking

When I added error checking to the mutex and semaphore operations, I found that:

sem_init(&context.full) failed (-1)
errno = 78 (Function not implemented)

So, the weird outputs are because MacOS X does not implement sem_init(). It's odd; the sem_wait() function failed with errno = 9 (EBADF 'Bad file descriptor'); I added the checks there first. Then I checked the initialization...

Using sem_open() instead of sem_init()

The sem_open() calls succeed, which looks good (names "/full.sem" and "/empty.sem", flags O_CREAT, mode values of 0444, 0600, 0700 at different times, and initial values 0 and BUFFER_SIZE, as with sem_init()). Unfortunately, the first sem_wait() or sem_post() operation fails with errno = 9 (EBADF 'Bad file descriptor') again.

Morals

• It is important to check error conditions from system calls.
• The output I see is non-deterministic because the semaphores don't work.
• That doesn't alter the 'it does not crash without the pthread_join() calls' behaviour.
• MacOS X does not have a working POSIX semaphore implementation.