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[[!tag open_issue_hurd gsoc-task]]
Every now and then, new locking issues are discovered in
[[hurd/libdiskfs]] or [[hurd/translator/ext2fs]], for example. Nowadays
these in fact seem to be the most often encountered cause of Hurd crashes
/ lockups.
One of these could be traced
recently, and turned out to be a lock inside [[hurd/libdiskfs]] that was taken
and not released in some cases. There is reason to believe that there are more
faulty paths causing these lockups.
The task is systematically checking the [[hurd/libdiskfs]] code for this kind of locking
issues. To achieve this, some kind of test harness has to be implemented: For
example instrumenting the code to check locking correctness constantly at
runtime. Or implementing a [[unit testing]] framework that explicitly checks
locking in various code paths. (The latter could serve as a template for
implementing unit tests in other parts of the Hurd codebase...)
(A [[systematic code review|security]] would probably suffice to find the
existing locking
issues; but it wouldn't document the work in terms of actual code produced, and
thus it's not suitable for a GSoC project...)
This task requires experience with debugging locking issues in
[[multithreaded|multithreading]] applications.
Tools have been written for automated [[code analysis]]; these can help to
locate and fix such errors.
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