Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

<[email protected]> · Wed, 14 Mar 2012 13:08:28 +0000

When running libca with asynchronous and preemptive callbacks, ie, I've called

	ca_context_create(1)

is there any guarantee about when subscription callbacks can occur?

For instance, if I have called:

	ca_create_subscription( ... my_callback ..., &event_id)

and then subsequently call ca_clear_subscription(event_id) is there any guarantee that I can rely on that my_callback() cannot be in progress when ca_clear_subscription() returns?

The problem is, of course, one of resource management -- at what point is it safe to delete the resources associated with the channel and needed by my_callback()?

In an ideal world I would hope that ca_clear_subscription() would block until any outstanding callbacks (potentially running in other cores) had completed together with providing a guarantee that there would be no further callbacks ... but I'm guessing such hopes are unfounded?

Of course, the same question applies to calling ca_clear_channel() when there are outstanding put or get callbacks that might complete at a peculiarly inconvenient moment.

In the absence of such guarantees what can I do to reduce or eliminate potential race conditions when closing channels and subscriptions?  At the moment the only remedy I can think of is to wait a moment, not exactly the stuff of guarantees.

A quick glance at the code (in ca) seems to show that although there is an epicsGuard taken during ca_clear_subscription, as far as I can tell the guard is dropped during callbacks ... for understandable reasons.

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Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System