Deadlocking problems with recursive_mutex on Linux with boost 1.2 9.0

From: beat.schaer_at_[hidden]
Date: 2002-12-04 06:46:29

Hi

I experienced a lot of deadlocking situations when I used recursive_mutex on
SuSE Linux 8.1. When I analysed this mutex code I found out, that the
implementation of recursive_mutex on Linux is based on recursive POSIX
mutexes (set with pthread_mutexattr_settype(&attr,
PTHREAD_MUTEX_RECURSIVE)). Things were getting interesting when I didn't
find a man page for this function and I started to suspect Linux not having
implemented this mutex type.

The next thing I had done was to disable recursive POSIX mutexes by
commenting out the line "#define BOOST_HAS_PTHREAD_MUTEXATTR_SETTYPE" in the
file boost_1_29_0/boost/config/posix_features.hpp" forcing boost to
implement recursive_mutex by itself.

Since then everything is working quite perfectly!

But I'd like to raise some questions:
* Is my assumption correct that Linux doesn't have a proper support for
recursive POSIX mutexes?
* Can I expect that this problem will be solved in a future release of
boost?

Regards
Beat