Probably Dance

I continue to have no time for big programming projects, so here is a short blog post. Two years ago I looked into a bug in the glibc implementation of condition variables: Sometimes pthread_cond_signal() doesn’t do anything, which can easily hang your program. The bug is still not fixed, partially because a mitigation patch was available right away that seemed to make it go away. Except that people kept on showing up in the bug report saying that they still hit the bug sometimes, raising the suspicion that there might be a second bug. I finally got around to looking into this. I found that the mitigation patch only helps a little, it’s still the same bug, and the patch I submitted (unreviewed, don’t use yet) would actually fix it.