Chris Quenelle's Weblog
Thoughts on developer tools.

Friday September 15, 2006

Data Race in my last example

I got some polite email from Yuan Lin pointing out that my example program had a data race in it. He suggested that I should change my food_on_table function as follows to avoid the race.

From

int food_on_table() {
   pthread_mutex_lock(&foodlock);
   if (food>0) {
      food--;
   }
   pthread_mutex_unlock(&foodlock);
   return food;
}

to

int food_on_table() {
   int current_food;
   pthread_mutex_lock(&foodlock);
   current_food = food;
   if (food>0) {
      food--;
      current_food = food;
   }
   pthread_mutex_unlock(&foodlock);
   return current_food;
} 

Good catch, Yuan! Thanks for the tip. Next time I'll use our Data Race Detection Tool. Posted by Chris Quenelle ( Sep 15 2006, 04:23:16 PM PDT ) - Permalink - - Development Tools

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