Description
Feature or enhancement
The multiprocessing SemLock
code maintains an internal count
field. When operating as a recursive mutex, count
is the number of times the thread has acquired the mutex (i.e., 0, 1, .. N). When operating as a semaphore, count
is often 0
or 1
, but can be negative if the SemLock
is initialized with maxvalue > 1
The modification of count
is not thread-safe without the GIL within the process. Note that the count
field is not shared across processes, unlike the underlying sem_t
or HANDLE
.
In particular, the modification of count
after the semaphore is released is not thread-safe without the GIL:
cpython/Modules/_multiprocessing/semaphore.c
Lines 444 to 448 in 9dae05e
I think this is the source of deadlocks when running test_multiprocessing_forkserver.test_processes
with the GIL disabled.