Decouple inferior_ptid/inferior_thread(); dup ptids in thread list (PR 25412)
In PR 25412, Simon noticed that after the multi-target series, the
tid-reuse.exp testcase manages to create a duplicate thread in the
thread list. Or rather, two threads with the same PTID.
add_thread_silent has code in place to detect the case of a new thread
reusing some older thread's ptid, but it doesn't work correctly
anymore when the old thread is NOT the current thread and it has a
refcount higher than 0. Either condition prevents a thread from being
deleted, but the refcount case wasn't being considered. I think the
reason that case wasn't considered is that that code predates
thread_info refcounting. Back when it was originally written,
delete_thread always deleted the thread.
That add_thread_silent code in question has some now-unnecessary
warts, BTW. For instance, this:
/* Make switch_to_thread not read from the thread. */
new_thr->state = THREAD_EXITED;
... used to be required because switch_to_thread would update
'stop_pc' otherwise. I.e., it would read registers from an exited
thread otherwise. switch_to_thread no longer reads the stop_pc, since:
commit
f2ffa92bbce9dd5fbedc138ac2a3bc8a88327d09
Author: Pedro Alves <palves@redhat.com>
AuthorDate: Thu Jun 28 20:18:24 2018 +0100
gdb: Eliminate the 'stop_pc' global
Also, if the ptid of the now-gone current thread is reused, we
currently return from add_thread_silent with the current thread
pointing at the _new_ thread. Either pointing at the old thread, or
at no thread selected would be reasonable. But pointing at an
unrelated thread (the new thread that happens to reuse the ptid) is
just broken. Seems like I was the one who wrote it like that but I
have no clue why, FWIW.
Currently, an exited thread kept in the thread list still holds its
original ptid. The idea was that we need the ptid to be able to
temporarily switch to another thread and then switch back to the
original thread, because thread switching is really inferior_ptid
switching. Switching back to the original thread requires a ptid
lookup.
Now, in order to avoid exited threads with the same ptid as a live
thread in the same thread list, one thing I considered (and tried) was
to change an exited thread's ptid to minus_one_ptid. However, with
that, there's a case that we won't handle well, which is if we end up
with more than one exited thread in the list, since then all exited
threads will all have the same ptid. Since inferior_thread() relies
on inferior_ptid, may well return the wrong thread.
My next attempt to address this, was to switch an exited thread's ptid
to a globally unique "exited" ptid, which is a ptid with pid == -1 and
tid == 'the thread's global GDB thread number'. Note that GDB assumes
that the GDB global thread number is monotonically increasing and
doesn't wrap around. (We should probably make GDB thread numbers
64-bit to prevent that happening in practice; they're currently signed
32-bit.) This attempt went a long way, but still ran into a number of
issues. It was a major hack too, obviously.
My next attempt is the one that I'm proposing, which is to bite the
bullet and break the connection between inferior_ptid and
inferior_thread(), aka the current thread. I.e., make the current
thread be a global thread_info pointer that is written to directly by
switch_to_thread, etc., and making inferior_thread() return that
pointer, instead of having inferior_thread() lookup up the
inferior_ptid thread, by ptid_t. You can look at this as a
continuation of the effort of using more thread_info pointers instead
of ptids when possible.
By making the current thread a global thread_info pointer, we can make
switch_to_thread simply write to the global thread pointer, which
makes scoped_restore_current_thread able to restore back to an exited
thread without relying on unrelyable ptid look ups. I.e., this makes
it not a real problem to have more than one thread with the same ptid
in the thread list. There will always be only one live thread with a
given ptid, so code that looks up a live thread by ptid will always be
able to find the right one.
This change required auditing the whole codebase for places where we
were writing to inferior_ptid directly to change the current thread,
and change them to use switch_to_thread instead or one of its
siblings, because otherwise inferior_thread() would return a thread
unrelated to the changed-to inferior_ptid. That was all (hopefully)
done in previous patches.
After this, inferior_ptid is mainly used by target backend code. It
is also relied on by a number of target methods. E.g., the
target_resume interface and the memory reading routines -- we still
need it there because we need to be able to access memory off of
processes for which we don't have a corresponding inferior/thread
object, like when handling forks. Maybe we could pass down a context
explicitly to target_read_memory, etc.
gdb/ChangeLog:
2020-06-18 Pedro Alves <palves@redhat.com>
PR gdb/25412
* gdbthread.h (delete_thread, delete_thread_silent)
(find_thread_ptid): Update comments.
* thread.c (current_thread_): New global.
(is_current_thread): Move higher, and reimplement.
(inferior_thread): Reimplement.
(set_thread_exited): Use bool. Add assertions.
(add_thread_silent): Simplify thread-reuse handling by always
calling delete_thread.
(delete_thread): Remove intro comment.
(find_thread_ptid): Skip exited threads.
(switch_to_thread_no_regs): Write to current_thread_.
(switch_to_no_thread): Check CURRENT_THREAD_ instead of
INFERIOR_PTID. Clear current_thread_.