[RTEMS Project] #2811: More robust thread dispatching on SMP and ARM Cortex-M

[RTEMS trac]

#2811: More robust thread dispatching on SMP and ARM Cortex-M
-----------------------------+------------------------------
 Reporter:  sebastian.huber  |       Owner:  sebastian.huber
     Type:  enhancement      |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal           |   Milestone:  4.12
Component:  cpukit           |     Version:  4.11
 Severity:  normal           |  Resolution:
 Keywords:                   |
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Comment (by sebastian.huber):

 I think a fatal error is  more appropriate here.

 * Applications which have this usage error needs to be fixed at compile-
 time. It makes no sense to ship an SMP application with this bug.

 * Return codes can be ignored. I definitely have seen code like this
 before:
 {{{
 #!c
 /* This cannot fail, we know the identifier is valid */
 (void) pthread_mutex_lock(&mtx);
 }}}

 * This ticket is a result of porting a real world application from uni-
 processor to SMP.  If you are not an expert of the operating system
 internals and your application has this bug, then you need easily a couple
 of days to figure out the problem.  So, it is important to make sure it
 gets detected.

 * To figure out what caused a fatal error is easy. The (source, error)
 pair uniquely identifies the source code location of the error. With a
 stack trace and the executing thread you get enough information to locate
 the problem in the code. There is no need for a thread aware debugger.

 * This is a new constraint specific to SMP. Existing software may be
 simply unaware of this issue. However, its important to detect this
 constraint violation.

 * _Thread_Do_dispatch() has no return value.  Adding this check to other
 places would be much more difficult, error prone. with more space and time
 overhead, and labour intensive to test.

--
Ticket URL: <http://devel.rtems.org/ticket/2811#comment:4>
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