'Twas brillig, and Jaroslav Kysela at 23/08/10 16:13 did gyre and gimble:
On Mon, 23 Aug 2010, Colin Guthrie wrote:
Hi there,
I've got a (hopefully quick) query about snd_config_update_free_global() and it's general thread safetyness.
I'm currently going insane on this bug: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=232068 which revolves around a bug manifested in snd_pcm_close() (or rather snd_pcm_ioplug_close()) when dealing with the ALSA->PulseAudio plugin.
From what I can gather, this problem is related to a KDE module that is
loaded into the library in question which does some alsa probing and ultimately calls snd_config_update_free_global() several times. The library itself then goes on to use GStreamer to do actual audio output. The crash then manifests itself prior to any sound actually being output.
I can reliably reproduce the machine on two machines (I don't have many at my disposal), but cannot reproduce on a third. The two I can reproduce it on are two and four core intel duo's. The one I cannot reproduce on is an older, single core machine. I am leaning towards some kind of thread safety issue.
In searching for similar problems, I found several references to similar crashes attributed to snd_dlobj_cache_cleanup() perhaps not being thread safe.
I tried to work on snd_dlobj_cache issues. Please, could you test this patch?
http://git.alsa-project.org/?p=alsa-lib.git;a=commitdiff;h=91c9c8f1b85e69b4b...
Sure, will try and do so this evening and report back. Thanks!
Col