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ID Dateup Author Topic Subject
  725   23 Sep 2010 Stefan RittInfoAnother example of a JavaScript midas page
Please find attached another example of a JavaScript (JS) page using the 
ODBGet/Set functions. 

In contrast to the previous posting, the page is not constructed via the 
document.writeln() function, but written directly in HTML and modified through the 
"innerHTML = ..." functionality. 

It is a control page for our beamline, which gets updated in the background. In 
addition, the user can set the beamline to three predefined settings which are 
stored in an array at the top of the page. As an little extra there is a progress 
bar, which is updated locally via JS since changing the beamline takes a while. 
The progress bar is implemented as a table with variable width, and dynamically 
updated by the JS program. The second attachment is a screen dump from such a 
switching process. Since only values in the ODB are changed, you can try it 
yourself without actually modifying a PSI beam line ;-)
  726   24 Sep 2010 Konstantin OlchanskiInfoExample javascript midas page
> > We had javascript ODBGet() and ODBSet() functions for some time now, permitting 
> implementation of 
> > "page-reload-free" "self-updating" web pages. I finally got around to put all 
> the javascript bits together 
> > to actually implement such a page.
> 
> Unfortunately the page has tons of JavaScript errors, probably happened during 
> copy-and-paste to elog.

The attached errors all seem to be from cut-and-paste line breaks in the long "document.writeln()" statements. 
When the page runs, there are no errors from Firefox and Safari.

This example uses "document.writeln()" because the number of PostAmp devices displayed in the table is not 
known in advance and is potentially read from ODB at page load time.

K.O.
  727   24 Sep 2010 Stefan RittInfoExample javascript midas page
> The attached errors all seem to be from cut-and-paste line breaks in the long "document.writeln()" statements. 
> When the page runs, there are no errors from Firefox and Safari.

Then it would be good if you re-submit the file as an attachment so that other people can use it.

> This example uses "document.writeln()" because the number of PostAmp devices displayed in the table is not 
> known in advance and is potentially read from ODB at page load time.

This was not a criticism but just to show that there are different ways of constructing such a page, depending on the 
needs. So people have the choice. Anyhow I think it's very good to have some working examples for people to start 
with.
  728   06 Oct 2010 Konstantin OlchanskiBug Reportmhttpd "edit on start" breakage
very recent mhttpd mangles spaces in URL encoding-decoding and I cannot create or delete entries in for 
example "/experiment/edit on start". For example attempt to delete "/experiment/Pedestals Run" 
produces:
<h1>Cannot find key Experiment/edit%20on%20start/Pedestals run</h1>
(notice "%20" instead of spaces. further navigation sometimes replaces the "%" sign with "%25" making it 
even more mangled)

this used to work. looks like a call to URL unmangling went missing somewhere.
K.O.
  729   29 Oct 2010 Konstantin OlchanskiInfomlogger.c 4858-4862 busted
Please note that mlogger does not work (crashes on run start) starting with svn
rev 4858, fixed in svn 4862. If you have to use this busted version of mlogger,
the crash is fixed by update of history_midas.c to svn rev 4862 or set ODB
/Logger/WriteFileHistory to 'n'. Sorry for the inconvenience. K.O.
  730   02 Nov 2010 chris pearsonInfomhttpd: Extra entries on status page
   A couple of experiments at triumf wanted certain important odb variables
displayed on their status page.  (There was already the possibility to show the
run comment)
   A new folder "/Experiment/Status Items" was created containing links to the
variables of interest, these items are show on the status page, under the run
comment (if any), in 3 columns.

the code from mhttpd.c:show_status_page()
between
   /*---- run comment ----*/
and
   /*---- Equipment list ----*/
is attached
  731   12 Nov 2010 Pierre-Andre AmaudruzReleaseDocumentation
The general Midas documentation has been rejuvenated by Suzannah Daviel through 
a proof reading and with a collection of custom perl scripts to improve the 
Doxygen capabilities for the document itself. In particular, a contents list and 
alphabetical index of the documentation is generated automatically.

The new content is based on the previous version but with more cross-references, 
examples and descriptive images where necessary. Many of the previously 
undocumented features are now included.

The layout and organization is slightly different and requires getting used to, 
but hopefully will be an improvement.
Some of the changes are:
- The main topics are maintained, but we try to regroup all the aspects
  related to a particular topic in the same section.
- The Yellow icons provide navigation within the index section.
- The Blue icons provide navigation within the section content.

The full documentation is included under the midas/doc/src directory in the 
Midas distribution (SVN) and can be generated with the Doxygen tool.
The midasdoc-images.tar.gz from either https://midas.psi.ch/download/ or 
http://ladd00.triumf.ca/~daqweb/ftp/ needs to be extracted to the midas 
directory under doc/images for complete local web pages generation.

There are a few "ToDo" items which hopefully will be ironed out soon.
Feel free to contact us for pointing out omissions or improvements.

We hope this online documentation will serve as a better tool for your 
understanding of the Midas capabilities.
  732   17 Nov 2010 Stefan RittBug Reportmhttpd "edit on start" breakage
> very recent mhttpd mangles spaces in URL encoding-decoding and I cannot create or delete entries in for 
> example "/experiment/edit on start". For example attempt to delete "/experiment/Pedestals Run" 
> produces:
> <h1>Cannot find key Experiment/edit%20on%20start/Pedestals run</h1>
> (notice "%20" instead of spaces. further navigation sometimes replaces the "%" sign with "%25" making it 
> even more mangled)
> 
> this used to work. looks like a call to URL unmangling went missing somewhere.
> K.O.

Thanks for reporting. Fixed in SVN revision 4882. Actually I outcommented the fix some time ago and forgot to 
put it back. Now I hope that this does not blow anything else...

- Stefan
  733   15 Dec 2010 Stefan RittInfoNew source file structure of MSCB tree
A long planned modification of the source file structure of the MSCB subsystem has been implemented. This is however only for those people who do actively participate in micro controller programming with MSCB. The idea behind this is tha the central include file mscbemb.h had a section for each new project. So whenever a new project was added, this file had to be modified which is clumsy and hard to maintain. Therefore I took the project specific sections out of this file and put it into a config.h file, which is separate for each project (very similar to VxWorks). So the folder tree now looks like this:
midas\mscb\embedded
  \include                <- place for framework include file mscbemb.h
  \lib                    <- precompiled TCP/IP library for SCS-260 submaster
  \src                    <- framework sources mscbmain.c and mscbutil.c
  \<project1>             <- separate folder for project1
      config.h            <- config file for project1
  \<project2>             <- separate folder for project2
      config.h            <- config file for project2
  ...
  \experiment
     \<experiment1>
     \<experiment2>

So each project has it's own config.h, which is included from the central mscbemb.h and can be used to enable certain features of the framework without having to change the framework itself. The "projectx" folders contain devices which are used across several experiments and sometimes also between institutes (PSI and TRIUMF). If you make a device which is only used in a specific experiment, this should go under \experiment with the name of the device or the experiment as a subdirectory. I encourage everybody to submit even specific projects to the subversion system since they can sometimes be useful for others to look at some example code.

A few other things have to be changed in order to adapt to the new structure:

  • The framework files mscbmain.c mscbutil.c and mscbemb.h have moved and therefore they have to be re-added to the projects in the Keil MicroVision Development Environment.
  • The name of the device should not be defined under compiler settings (Project Options/C51/Preprocessor Symbols), but put directly into the config.h file associated with the project.
  • The include paths in the compile have to be changed and point to \midas\mscb\embedded\include
  • The file config.h has to be copied from a similar project and adjusted to fit the new project.

I did remove all project specific sections from mscbemb.h in the current SVN version, so certain projects (FDB_008 at TRIUMF, CRATE_MONITOR and PT100X8 at PSI) have to retrieve the settings (like LED ports etc.) from the old mscbemb.h and put it into the config.h file.

Furthermore there is a new STARTUP_VDDMON.A51 file in the src directory which should be added to each project. This was recommended by the micro controller manufacturer and fixes cases where the EEPROM contents of the CPU gets lost from time to time during power up.

The last thing is that PSI switched to MicroVision 4 as the development environment, so I added new project files (*.uvproj and *.uvopt instead *.Uv2), but I left the old ones there in case someone still has the uV2 environment. They are however not maintained any more.

If there is any problem with the new structure or you have some comments, please don't hesitate to contact me.


- Stefan
  734   23 Dec 2010 Konstantin OlchanskiBug Reportodb corruption, odb race condition?
The following script makes midas very unhappy and eventually causes odb corruption. I suspect the reason is some kind of race condition collision between client 
creation and destruction code and the watchdog activity (each client periodically runs cm_watchdog() to check if other clients are still alive, O(NxN) total complexity). 
Amongst messages appearing in midas.log:

Thu Dec 23 11:59:08 2010 [ODBEdit28,INFO] Client 'unknown' on buffer 'SYSMSG' removed by bm_open_buffer because client pid 20463 does not exist
Thu Dec 23 11:59:09 2010 [ODBEdit43,INFO] Client 'unknown' on buffer 'SYSMSG' removed by cm_watchdog because client pid 20465 does not exist
Thu Dec 23 12:11:21 2010 [ODBEdit,ERROR] [odb.c:1061:db_open_database,ERROR] Removing client 'ODBEdit11', pid 21536, index 27 because the pid no longer exists
Thu Dec 23 17:06:15 2010 [ODBEdit,ERROR] [odb.c:988:db_open_database,ERROR] maximum number of clients exceeded
Thu Dec 23 12:10:30 2010 [ODBEdit9,ERROR] [odb.c:3247:db_get_value,ERROR] "Name" is of type NULL, not STRING

The last message about <"Name" is of type NULL> appears during normal operation of the ND280 DAQ, leading me into these investigations.

Notes:
a) the script runs at most 50 copies of odbedit, never exceeding midas.h MAX_CLIENTS value 64, so one does not expect to see messages about "maximum number of 
clients exceeded"
b) the script runs 50 copies of odbedit in parallel, increasing the likelihood of whatever race condition is causing this. In the ND280 system, likelihood of failure is 
increased by the large number of running clients (10-20-30 clients), each client running periodic cm_watchdog, to collide with new client creation or destruction.
c) in other experiments, we do not see this (ok, we do have midas meltdowns once in a while) because (1) we tend to have fewer clients (reduced frequency of 
cm_watchdog), (2) we tend to not start and stop midas clients too often (reduced frequency of running client creation and destruction). (NB it seems like ND280 people 
tend to run many scripts containing odbedit commands, so they effectively start and stop midas clients more often than usual).


#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#$cmd = "odbedit -c \'scl -w\' &";
$cmd = "odbedit -c \'ls -l /system/clients\' &";
for (my $i=0; $i<50; $i++)
{
system $cmd;
}
#end
  735   24 Dec 2010 Konstantin OlchanskiBug Reportodb corruption, odb race condition?
> Thu Dec 23 12:10:30 2010 [ODBEdit9,ERROR] [odb.c:3247:db_get_value,ERROR] "Name" is of type NULL, not STRING

This is caused by a race condition between client removal in cm_delete_client_info() and cm_exist().

The race condition in cm_exist() works like this:
- db_enum_key() returns the hkey (pointer to) the next /System/Clients/PID directory
- the client corresponding to PID is removed, our hkey now refers to a deleted entry
- db_get_value() tries to use the now stale hkey pointing to a deleted entry, complains about invalid key TID.

Because the offending db_get_value() is called with the "create if not found" argument set to TRUE, there is potential
for writing into ODB using a stale hkey, maybe leading to ODB corruption. Other than that, this race condition seems
to be benign.

cm_exist() is called from:
everybody->cm_yield()->al_check()->cm_exist()

Further analysis:
- cm_yield() calls al_check() every 10 sec, al_check() calls cm_exist() to check for "program is not running" alarms.
- in al_check() cm_exist() is called once for each entry in /Programs/xxx, even for programs with no alarms. (Maybe I should change this?)
- assuming 10 programs are running (10 clients), every 10 seconds, cm_exist() will be called 10 times and inside, will loop over 10 clients, exposing the enum-get race condition 10*10=100 times every 10 seconds. Usually, 
ODB /Programs/ has many more entries than there are active clients, further increasing the frequency of exposure of this race condition.

K.O.
  736   24 Dec 2010 Konstantin OlchanskiBug Reportodb corruption, odb race condition?
> > Thu Dec 23 12:10:30 2010 [ODBEdit9,ERROR] [odb.c:3247:db_get_value,ERROR] "Name" is of type NULL, not STRING
> This is caused by a race condition between client removal in cm_delete_client_info() and cm_exist().
> ... this race condition seems to be benign.

Not so benign - after fixing cm_exist() to check the return value of db_get_value() and calling it without the "create" flag,
a crasher turned up inside db_find_key() called by db_get_value() with these stale hkeys. For invalid keys (not TID_KEY),
it would call db_get_path() and crash.

So after adding a check for valid key types, my test script runs much better - all the major weirdness is gone, I only see
rare messages from db_find_key(), db_get_key() and db_get_value() about invalid key and data types (after all,
I did not fix the underlying race condition).

The only remaining problem when running my script is some kind of deadlock between the ODB and SYSMSG semaphores...

K.O.
  737   26 Dec 2010 Konstantin OlchanskiBug Reportrace condition and deadlock between ODB lock and SYSMSG lock in cm_msg()
> 
> The only remaining problem when running my script is some kind of deadlock between the ODB and SYSMSG semaphores...
> 


In theory, we understand how programs that use 2 semaphores to protect 2 shared resources can deadlock
if there are mistakes in how locks are used.

For example, consider 2 semaphores A and B and 2 concurrent
subroutines foo() and bar() running at exactly the same time:

foo() { lock(A); lock(B); do stuff; unlock(B); unlock(A); } and
bar() { lock(B); lock(A); do stuff; unlock(A); unlock(B); }

This system will deadlock immediately with foo() taking semaphore A, bar() taking semaphore B,
then foo() waiting for B and bar() waiting for A forever.

This situation can also be described as a race condition where foo() and bar() are racing each
other to get the semaphores, with the result depending on who gets there first
and, in this case, sometimes the result is deadlock.

In this example, the size of the race condition time window is the wall clock time
between actually locking both semaphores in the sequence "lock(X); lock(Y);". While
locking a semaphore is "instantaneous", the actual function lock() takes time to call
and execute, and this time is not fixed - it can change if the CPU takes a hardware
interrupt (quick), a page fault (when we may have to wait until data is read from the swap file)
or a scheduler interrupt (when we are outright stopped for milliseconds while the CPU runs
some other process).

In reality, subroutines foo() and bar() do not run at exactly the same time, so the probability
of deadlock will depend on how often foo() and bar() are executed, the size of the race condition time window,
the number of processes executing foo() and bar(), and the amount of background activity
like swapping, hardware interrupts, etc.

(Also note that on a single-cpu system, we will probably never see a deadlock between foo() and bar()
because they will never be running at the same time. But the deadlock is still there, waiting
for the lucky moment when the scheduler switches from foo() to bar() just at the wrong place).

There is more on deadlocks and stuff written at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadlock
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_condition

In case of MIDAS, the 2 semaphores are the ODB lock and the SYSMSG lock (also remember about locks
for the shared memory event buffers, SYSTEM, etc, but they seem to be unlikely to deadlock).

The function foo() is any ODB function (db_xxx) that locks ODB and then calls cm_msg() (which locks SYSMSG).

The function bar() is cm_msg() which locks SYSMSG and then calls some ODB db_xxx() function which tries to lock ODB.

(This is made more interesting by cm_watchdog() periodically called by alarm(), where we alternately
take SYSMSG (via bm_cleanup) and ODB locks.)

I think this establishes a theoretical possibility for MIDAS to deadlock on the ODB and SYSMSG semaphores.

In practice, I think we almost never see this deadlock because cm_msg() is not called very often, and during normal
operation, is almost never called from inside ODB functions holding the ODB lock - almost all calls to cm_msg from
ODB functions are made to report some kind of problem with the ODB internal structure, something that "never"
happens.

By "luck" I stumbled into this deadlock when doing the "odbedit" fork-bomb torture tests, when high ODB lock
activity is combined with high cm_msg() activity reporting clients starting and stopping, combined with a large
number of MIDAS clients running, starting and stopping.

So a deadlock I see within 1 minute of running the torture test, other lucky people will see after running an experiment
for 1 year, or 1 month, or 1 day, depending.

In theory, this deadlock can be removed by establishing a fixed order of taking locks. There will never be a deadlock
if we always take the SYSMSG lock first, then ask for the ODB lock.

In practice, it means that using cm_msg() while holding an ODB lock is automatically dangerous
and should be avoided if not forbidden.

And it does work. By refactoring a few places in client startup, shutdown and cleanup code, I made the deadlock "go away",
and my test script (posted in my first message) no longer deadlocks, even if I run hundreds of odbedit's at the same time.

Unfortunately,  it is impractical to audit and refactor all of MIDAS to completely remove this problem. MIDAS call graphs
are sufficiently complicated for making manual analysis of lock sequences infeasible and
I expect any automatic lock analysis tool will be defeated by the cm_watchdog() periodic interrupt.

An improvement is possible if we make cm_msg() safe for calling from inside the ODB db_xxx() function. Instead
of immediately sending messages to SYSMSG (requiring a SYSMSG lock), if ODB is locked, cm_msg() could
save the messages in a buffer, which would be flushed when the ODB lock is released. (This does not fix
all the other places that take ODB and SYSMSG locks in arbitrary order, but I think those places are not as
likely to deadlock, compared to cm_msg()).

However, now that I have greatly reduced the probability of deadlock in the client startup/shutdown/cleanup code,
maybe there is no urgency for changing cm_msg() - remember that if we do not call cm_msg() we will never deadlock -
and during normal operation, cm_msg() is almost never called.

Investigation completed, I will now cleanup, retest and commit my changes to midas.c and odb.c. Looking into this
and writing it up was a good intellectual exercise.

P.S. Also remember that there are locks for shared memory event buffers (SYSTEM, etc), but those do not involve
lock inversion leading to deadlock. I think all lock sequences are like this: SYSTEM->ODB, SYSTEM->SYSMSG->ODB,
there are no inverted sequences SYSMSG->SYSTEM or ODB->SYSTEM and the only deadlocking
sequence SYSTEM->ODB->SYSMSG, does not really involve the SYSTEM lock.

K.O.
  738   29 Dec 2010 Konstantin OlchanskiBug Reportuse of nested locks in MIDAS
A "nested" or "recursive" lock is a special type of lock that permits a lock holder to lock the same resources again and again, without deadlocking on itself. They are 
very useful, but tricky to implement because most system lock primitives (SYSV semaphores, POSIX mutexes, etc) do not permit nested locks, so all the logic for 
"yes, I am the holder of the lock, yes, I can go ahead without taking it again" (plus the reverse on unlocking) has to be done "by hand". As ever, if implemented 
wrong or used wrong, Bad Things happen. Many people dislike nested locks because of the added complexity, but realistically, it is impossible to build a system 
that does not require nested locking at least somewhere.

MIDAS lock primitives - ss_semaphore_wait_for(), db_lock_database() and bm_lock_buffer() implement a type of nested locks.

ODB locks implemented in db_lock_database() fully support nested (recursive) locking and this feature is heavily used by the ODB library. Many ODB db_xxx() 
functions take the ODB lock, do something, then call another ODB function that also takes the ODB lock recursively. This works well.

Unfortunately, the ODB nested lock implementation is NOT thread-safe. (Unless one is connected through the mserver, in which case, db_xxx() functions ARE 
thread-safe because all ODB access is serialized by the mserver RPC mutex).

Event buffer locks implemented in bm_lock_buffer() rely on ss_semaphore_xxx() to provide nested locking.

ss_semaphore_wait_for() uses SYSV semaphores, which do not provide nested locking, except when called from cm_watchdog(). (keep reading).

Because bm_lock_buffer() does not implement nested locking, use of cm_msg() in buffer management code will lead to self-deadlock, as shown in the following 
stack trace, where bm_cleanup() is working on the SYSMSG buffer, locked it, then called cm_msg() which is now waiting on the SYSMSG lock, which we are holding 
ourselves.

(gdb) where
#0  0x00007fff87274e9e in semop ()
#1  0x0000000100024075 in ss_semaphore_wait_for (semaphore_handle=1179654, timeout=300000) at src/system.c:2280
#2  0x0000000100015292 in bm_lock_buffer (buffer_handle=<value temporarily unavailable, due to optimizations>) at src/midas.c:5386
#3  0x000000010000df97 in bm_send_event (buffer_handle=1, source=0x7fff5fbfd430, buf_size=<value temporarily unavailable, due to optimizations>, 
async_flag=0) at src/midas.c:6484
#4  0x000000010000e6f5 in cm_msg (message_type=2, filename=<value temporarily unavailable, due to optimizations>, line=4226, routine=0x10004559f 
"bm_cleanup", format=0x100045550 "Client '%s' on buffer '%s' removed by %s because process pid %d does not exist") at src/midas.c:722
#5  0x000000010001553c in bm_cleanup_buffer_locked (i=<value temporarily unavailable, due to optimizations>, who=0x100045f42 "bm_open_buffer", 
actual_time=869425784) at src/midas.c:4226
#6  0x00000001000167ee in bm_cleanup (who=0x100045f42 "bm_open_buffer", actual_time=869425784, wrong_interval=0) at src/midas.c:4286
#7  0x000000010001ae27 in bm_open_buffer (buffer_name=<value temporarily unavailable, due to optimizations>, buffer_size=100000, 
buffer_handle=0x10006e9ac) at src/midas.c:4550
#8  0x000000010001ae90 in cm_msg_register (func=0x100000c60 <process_message>) at src/midas.c:895
#9  0x0000000100009a13 in main (argc=3, argv=0x7fff5fbff3d8) at src/odbedit.c:2790

This example deadlock is not a normal code path - I accidentally exposed this deadlock sequence by adding some extra locking.

But in normal use, cm_msg() is called quite often from cm_watchdog() and as protection against this type of deadlock, MIDAS
ss_semaphore_xxx() has a special case that permits one level of nesting for locks called by code executed from cm_watchdog(). This is a very
clever implementation of partial nested locking.

So again, we are running into problems with cm_msg() - logically it should be at the very bottom of the system hierarchy - everybody calls it from their most 
delicate places, while holding various locks, etc - but instead, cm_msg() call the whole MIDAS system all over again - it calls ODB functions, event buffer functions, 
etc - mostly to open and to write into the SYSMSG buffer.

If you are reading this, I hope you are getting a better idea of the difference between textbook systems and systems that are used in the field to get some work 
done.

K.O.
  739   29 Dec 2010 Konstantin OlchanskiBug Reportfixed. odb corruption, odb race condition?
> 
> The only remaining problem when running my script is some kind of deadlock between the ODB and SYSMSG semaphores...
> 


I committed changes to odb.c and midas.c fixing a number of places that could corrupt ODB and SYSMSG data, and fixing a number of deadlocks. Without these 
changes, on my Mac, MIDAS will reliably corrupt ODB or deadlock while running my odbedit fork-bomb torture test script. These changes still need to be tested on 
Linux (but I do not expect any problems).

Because my changes do not fix the original race condition in client creation/removal/cleanup, you may still occasionally see messages like this:
13:35:14 [ODBEdit24,ERROR] [odb.c:2112:db_find_key,ERROR] hkey 169592 invalid key type 376
13:35:15 [ODBEdit28,ERROR] [odb.c:3268:db_get_value,ERROR] hkey 162072 entry "Name" is of type NULL, not STRING

For now, I am happy that we no longer corrupt ODB (nor deadlock) and I will work with Stefan on a permanent solution for this.

Special thanks go to the T2K/ND280 experiment, specifically, to Tim Nicholls and to the unnamed person who emailed me their script that executes many odbedit 
commands to setup midas history plots.


svn rev 4930
K.O.


P.S. Below is my torture test script, I usually run many of them in a sequence "./test1.perl >& xxx1; ./test1.perl >& xxx2; ... etc".

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
for (my $i=0; $i<50; $i++)
{
#my $cmd = "odbedit -c \'scl -w\' &";
#my $cmd = "odbedit -c \'ls -l /system/clients\' >& xxx$i &";
my $cmd = "odbedit -c \'ls -l /system/clients\' &";
system $cmd;
}
#end

svn rev 4930
K.O.
  740   17 Jan 2011 Andreas SuterBug ReportProblems with midas history SVN 4936
I have the following problems after updating to midas SVN 4936: the history 
system (web-page via mhttpd) seems to stop working. I checked the history files 
themself and they are indeed written, except that the events ID's are not the 
same anymore (I mean the ones defined under /Equipment/XXX/Common/Event ID), 
rather the mlogger seems to choose an ID by itself.
Currently the only way to get things working again was to recompile midas with 
adding -DOLD_HISTORY to the CFLAGS which is troublesome since it is likely to be 
forgotton with the next SVN update. When looking into the SVN I have the 
impression there is something going on concerning the history system, however
I couldn't find any documentation.
What is the best practice for the future, in order not to run into any problems 
but still being able to look at the old history (also from within the web-page 
via mhttpd)?
  741   11 Feb 2011 Konstantin OlchanskiBug Reportfixed. odb corruption, odb race condition?
> > 
> > The only remaining problem when running my script is some kind of deadlock between the ODB and SYSMSG semaphores...
> > 
> 
> For now, I am happy that we no longer corrupt ODB (nor deadlock) ...
>

Found one more deadlock between ODB and SYSMSG semaphores, this time through cm_watchdog():

If cm_watchdog somehow runs while we are holding the ODB semaphore, it will eventually try to lock SYSMSG (through bm_cleanup & co) in
violation of our semaphore locking order. If at the same time another application tries to lock stuff using the correct order (SYSMSG first, ODB last),
the two programs will deadlock (wait for each other forever). I presently have two copies of gdb attached to two copies of odbedit
waiting for each other in a deadlock through this cm_watchdog scenario...

Solution shall follow quickly, I have been hunting this deadlock for the last couple of weeks...

K.O.
  742   13 Feb 2011 Lee PoolBug ReportProblems with midas history SVN 4936
> I have the following problems after updating to midas SVN 4936: the history 
> system (web-page via mhttpd) seems to stop working. I checked the history files 
> themself and they are indeed written, except that the events ID's are not the 
> same anymore (I mean the ones defined under /Equipment/XXX/Common/Event ID), 
> rather the mlogger seems to choose an ID by itself.
> Currently the only way to get things working again was to recompile midas with 
> adding -DOLD_HISTORY to the CFLAGS which is troublesome since it is likely to be 
> forgotton with the next SVN update. When looking into the SVN I have the 
> impression there is something going on concerning the history system, however
> I couldn't find any documentation.
> What is the best practice for the future, in order not to run into any problems 
> but still being able to look at the old history (also from within the web-page 
> via mhttpd)?

Hi... 

Do you mind giving little more detail? We might have the same issue, where we got
complaints that midas history stops working after a certain time.

L
  743   15 Feb 2011 Konstantin OlchanskiBug Reportfixed. odb corruption, odb race condition?
> Solution shall follow quickly, I have been hunting this deadlock for the last couple of weeks...

Over the last couple of days I made a series of commits to odb.c and midas.c to implement a buffer-based cm_msg()
and fix the latest deadlock problem, also to help with the race conditions in client creation and cleanup.

My torture test runs okey in my mac now, one remaining problem is spurious client removal caused
by semaphore starvation - I see 2-3-7-10 sec wait times for semaphores - probably caused by some
kind of unfairness in the MacOS SysV semaphore implementation (in a "fair" semaphore implementation,
the process that waited the longest would be woken up the first and one would never see semaphore wait
times measured in seconds). Probably worth investigating fairness of MacOS posix semaphores. On LInux
things are probably different and under normal running conditions one should not see any semaphore starvation.

I will be doing extensive tests of this update at TRIUMF, but I do not expect any problems. If you use this
version and see any anomalies, please report them as replies to this message or email me directly.

svn rev 4976
K.O.
  744   15 Feb 2011 Konstantin OlchanskiBug Fixmlogger stop run on disk full!
The mlogger has a function for detecting when the output disk becomes full - when this condition is 
detected, the run should be stopped. But this did not work if disk is already full and the user tries to start 
a run - the "disk full?" check happened too early and the attempt to stop the run was not succeeding 
because the original start-run transition is still running. Now if "disk full" condition is detected, mlogger 
tries to stop the run every 10 seconds until the run is finally stopped (or dies because disk is full).

mlogger.c svn rev 4976
K.O.
ELOG V3.1.4-2e1708b5