Re: t5400 failure on Windows

From: Johannes Sixt <j6t@kdbg.org>
Date: May 16, 2017, 18:35 UTC
Message-ID: <afca6bf5-472e-dda4-2c16-a2256080ac51@kdbg.org>
In-Reply-To: <20170515222406.hxab2wrapv75ybmj@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Am 16.05.2017 um 00:24 schrieb Jeff King:

Show 10 quoted lines

>    4. There is something racy and unportable about both programs writing
>       to the same trace file. It's opened with O_APPEND, which means that
>       each write should atomically position the pointer at the end of the
>       file. Is it possible there's a problem with that in the way
>       O_APPEND works on Windows?
> 
>       If that was the case, though, I'd generally expect a sheared write
>       or a partial overwrite. The two origin/HEAD lines from the two
>       programs are the exact same length, but I'd find it more likely for
>       the overwrite to happen with one of the follow-on lines.

Good guesswork! O_APPEND is not atomic on Windows, in particular, it is emulated as lseek(SEEK_END) followed by write().

I ran the test a few more times, and it fails in different ways (different missing lines) and also succeeds in a minority of the cases.

Windows is capable of writing atomically in the way O_APPEND requires (keyword: FILE_APPEND_DATA), but I do not see a way to wedge this into the emulation layer. For the time being, I think I have to skip the test case.

The question remains how endangered our uses of O_APPEND are when the POSIX semantics are not obeyed precisely:

* trace.c: It is about debugging. Not critical.

* sequencer.c: It writes the "done" file. No concurrent accesses are 
expected: Not critial.

* refs/files-backend.c: There are uses in functions 
open_or_create_logfile() and log_ref_setup(). Sounds like it is in 
reflogs. Sounds like this is about reflogs. If there are concurrent 
accesses, there is a danger that a reflog is not recorded correctly. 
Then reflogs may be missing and objects may be pruned earlier than 
expected. That's something to worry about, but I would not count it as 
mission critical.

-- Hannes