Bug#445814: libcommoncpp2-1.5-0: onTimer() not called upon timer expiration in PosixThread

[Mikael Magnusson]

Michael Rumpler wrote:
> Package: libcommoncpp2-1.5-0
> Version: 1.5.1-4
> Severity: important
> 
> 
> When using timers in a class derived from PosixThread, the method
> onTimer() is not called when the timer expires, although the timer is
> running. I wrote a minimal test software to reproduce this problem.
> The problem does not arise on other systems (e.g. RHEL 4) with the
> same commoncpp version. As far as i found out, it must have something to
> do with the kernel version/c library or a combination of those.
> on a system running kernel 2.6.9 it works, on a system with 2.6.11
> it does no longer work... so far i did not try to run a debian etch system
> with a 2.6.9 to verify, maybe you find the problem faster than me ;-)
> 

> The software starts a timer in the class derived from PosixThread and 
> continously reads the timer value to prove the timer is running.
> If the onTimer() gets called the program makes happy outputs.
> 
> This call does not happen on Debian etch, but works on other distributions
> with - as is my knowledge so far - kernels < 2.6.10.
> 

My observations follows:

I'm running testing/unstable on Linux 2.6.18-3-k7, and onTimer isn't 
called on my system since the main thread receives SIGALRM and not the 
CiTimer thread. I can prevent this by using pthread_sigmask to block 
SIGALRM in main.

     sigset_t cancel, old;
     sigemptyset(&cancel);
     sigaddset(&cancel, SIGALRM);

     pthread_sigmask(SIG_BLOCK, &cancel, &old);

Mikael