Review Request: Fix a VLC crash by delaying object deletion to avoid invalid access by QtDBus...

[Thiago Macieira]

On Saturday, 5 de February de 2011 14:15:03 Dawit A wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 12:57 PM, Thiago Macieira <thiago at kde.org> wrote:
> > On Saturday, 5 de February de 2011 17:39:35 Dawit Alemayehu wrote:
> >> was that in both cases the backtrace shows QtDBus attempting to invoke
> >> or access some method or slot in the object that was just destroyed.
> >> At this
> > 
> > That's supposed to be impossible. QtDBus connects to the object's
> > destroyed(QObject*) signal, and removes the object from the object tree
> > when it's destroyed.
> > 
> > It's also thread-safe, as all manipulations of the object tree are done
> > under a write lock.
> 
> The cause could be the fact that KIO itself is not really thread-safe.
> I do not really know that for sure, but from what you described above,
> it would seem to me to be some sort of race condition which is a
> complete possibility in KIO (not thread safe). All I can say with 100%
> certainty is that deferring the deletion of the objects that register
> with QtDBus most definitely solves this bug, at least for me.

QtDBus only calls any methods in the QObject in the QObject's proper thread. 
There's no chance of it being the wrong thread here either.

> > The only thing I can think of is that something caused the signal to
> > disconnect.
> 
> Wouldn't the object being deleted cause the disconnect ? Dunno at what

Yes, but only *after* the slots connected to destroyed() were invoked. I mean 
that something disconnected the QDBusConnectionPrivate slot *before* deletion. 
The object was then deleted and a method invoked in it.

> point that would happen, but as you can see from the backtraces posted
> in BR# 234484, the QtDBus calls come after the object that registered
> with it is destructed. 

Which shouldn't happen, by construction.

> Oh and I forgot to mention a very important
> point. The deletion of both KBookmarkmanager and KIO::Scheduler, the
> obejcts that register with QtDBus, originates from the destruction
> KIO::SchedulerPrivate and KBookmarkManagerList respectively. Both
> these objects are global static objects created through
> K_GLOBAL_STATIC. Here is what KBookmarkManagerList's global static
> marco declaration expands to:
[snip]

No need, I designed K_GLOBAL_STATIC with Matthias Kretz back in the day.

Anyway, I can reproduce the crash on my office computer, even when running the 
multithreaded waitpid solution. I will try to valgrind the issue when I'm in 
the office on Tuesday.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
  Senior Product Manager - Nokia, Qt Development Frameworks
      PGP/GPG: 0x6EF45358; fingerprint:
      E067 918B B660 DBD1 105C  966C 33F5 F005 6EF4 5358
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