Re: [interprocess] Mutex and condition at process termination

From: Gavin Lambert (boost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2020-05-20 00:31:47

On 20/05/2020 01:22, Niall Douglas wrote:
> BTW, I assume you realise that your proposed scheme won't be watertight
> right? I mean that Windows doesn't send you a signal on process
> termination, and there are ways of terminating a POSIX process without
> it ever receiving a signal either. The biggest source of that on Linux
> is OOM, which is very irritating of it.

I'm not sure if Boost.Interprocess makes use of them (I assume not) but 
on Windows the standard kernel interprocess mutex will report an 
"abandoned" mutex if something tries to acquire a mutex that was owned 
by a terminated process/thread, regardless of how it was terminated.

This is a successful acquisition that indicates that the protected state 
may not be consistent.

Though I expect that most apps don't handle it as such and either just 
treat it as failure or press ahead anyway and just hope they don't 
crash/corrupt.