Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Fixing the disk code, part 3

The current store client code experiment involves this:

  • store clients are created and destroyed as per normal;
  • creation sets "flag.active", destruction clears "flag.active";
  • destruction doesn't deallocate the store client - it removes it from various lists and only -attempts- to free it via a new function, storeClientComplete()
  • storeClientComplete() (badly named) will only free the store client if it is marked as inactive and the callbacks it is a part of have returned.
  • In the callback functions, storeClientComplete() is called to see whether the store client should be freed, and if so, they terminate the callback
  • In the callback functions, if "flags.active" is clear, then the callback is terminated

Since cbdataFree() is not called until the flags are clear (active, disk_io_pending, event_pending) then it is possible that some callbacks will be called when they shouldn't be. In order to preserve the existing behaviour I need to further audit the store client code, find out which functions are passed in as callbacks, and make sure those functions correctly check the active state of the store client and also try calling storeClientComplete(). The problem here is that what controls the callback being called is the validity of the callback -data- - so I am hoping that there are no non-store client callbacks being scheduled with a store client instance as the callback data. Gah.

The other issue at the moment is that there is currently no guarantee (read: I haven't ensured it happens!) from the store API that the FileClosed() and FileNotify() routines get called before the store client is deregistered. I therefore can't delay free'ing the store client until those are also called. It should not be a big deal because the main motivation to delaying the store client -free- is to allow pending async operations using other data (in this case, read buffers) to complete before free'ing the data. In the two above instances the behaviour should be the same as before - the store client pointer will simply go invalid and the callbacks won't be made.

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