Simultaneous pwsh instance start Mutex.CreateMutexCore IOException race condition

Open
#2,658 20 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
csharp, powershell
Domain
cli, tooling

Research direction

Start at PSConsoleReadLine.DelayedOneTimeInitialize(), following the Mutex constructor and the PSReadLineHistoryFile name generation shown in the stack trace. Reproduce simultaneous pwsh launches, inspect how concurrent instances contend for the mutex, and verify that restored tabs no longer display the IOException.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Issue-Bug issue-mutex Needs-More Investigation

Environment

PSReadLine: 2.1.0
PowerShell: 7.1.3
OS: Darwin 20.5.0 Darwin Kernel Version 20.5.0: Sat May  8 05:10:33 PDT 2021; root:xnu-7195.121.3~9/RELEASE_X86_64
BufferWidth: 176
BufferHeight: 91

Exception report

iTerm session 3:

System.IO.IOException: The system cannot open the device or file specified. : 'PSReadLineHistoryFile_2886463743'
   at System.Threading.Mutex.CreateMutexCore(Boolean initiallyOwned, String name, Boolean& createdNew)
   at System.Threading.Mutex..ctor(Boolean initiallyOwned, String name)
   at Microsoft.PowerShell.PSConsoleReadLine.DelayedOneTimeInitialize()
   at Microsoft.PowerShell.PSConsoleReadLine.Initialize(Runspace runspace, EngineIntrinsics engineIntrinsics)
   at Microsoft.PowerShell.PSConsoleReadLine.ReadLine(Runspace runspace, EngineIntrinsics engineIntrinsics, CancellationToken cancellationToken)

iTerm session 4:

System.IO.IOException: The system cannot open the device or file specified. : 'PSReadLineHistoryFile_2886463743'
   at System.Threading.Mutex.CreateMutexCore(Boolean initiallyOwned, String name, Boolean& createdNew)
   at System.Threading.Mutex..ctor(Boolean initiallyOwned, String name)
   at Microsoft.PowerShell.PSConsoleReadLine.DelayedOneTimeInitialize()
   at Microsoft.PowerShell.PSConsoleReadLine.Initialize(Runspace runspace, EngineIntrinsics engineIntrinsics)
   at Microsoft.PowerShell.PSConsoleReadLine.ReadLine(Runspace runspace, EngineIntrinsics engineIntrinsics, CancellationToken cancellationToken)

Steps to reproduce

(Steps that shouldn't matter: My macbook was asleep in clamshell mode, I unplugged the display connections, and the OS crashed. I logged in and submitted the bug report to Apple, again.)

I saw this message on two tabs when iTerm2 was trying to restore a terminal window with four tab. The first two tabs did not have any error.

iTerm session restore caused 4 pwsh instances to launch at the same time, and got these two crashes from different pwsh instances.

Expected behavior

Launching multiple pwsh instances at the exact same time should not show error.

Actual behavior

Tabs 3 and 4 each showed the exception message above.


Running some debug commands, there are a lot of PSReadLineHistoryFile_2886463743 files created at nearly the exact same millisecond:

➜ ~ gci -r /tmp/.dotnet/shm

    Directory: /tmp/.dotnet/shm

Mode                 LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                 -------------         ------ ----
d----            7/8/2021 10:59 AM                session1999
d----            7/8/2021 12:55 PM                session5595
d----            7/8/2021 10:15 AM                session705
d----            7/8/2021 10:15 AM                session710
d----            7/8/2021 10:15 AM                session715
d----            7/8/2021 10:15 AM                session721

    Directory: /tmp/.dotnet/shm/session715

Mode                 LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                 -------------         ------ ----
-----            7/8/2021 10:15 AM           4096 PSReadLineHistoryFile_2886463743

    Directory: /tmp/.dotnet/shm/session705

Mode                 LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                 -------------         ------ ----
-----            7/8/2021 10:15 AM           4096 PSReadLineHistoryFile_2886463743

    Directory: /tmp/.dotnet/shm/session5595

Mode                 LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                 -------------         ------ ----
-----            7/8/2021 12:44 PM           4096 PSReadLineHistoryFile_2886463743
-----            7/8/2021 12:55 PM           4096 PSReadLineHistoryFile_3946503603

    Directory: /tmp/.dotnet/shm/session1999

Mode                 LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                 -------------         ------ ----
-----            7/8/2021 10:59 AM           4096 PSReadLineHistoryFile_2886463743

    Directory: /tmp/.dotnet/shm/session721

Mode                 LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                 -------------         ------ ----
-----            7/8/2021 10:15 AM           4096 PSReadLineHistoryFile_2886463743

    Directory: /tmp/.dotnet/shm/session710

Mode                 LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                 -------------         ------ ----
-----            7/8/2021 10:15 AM           4096 PSReadLineHistoryFile_2886463743
➜ ~ gci -r -file /tmp/.dotnet/shm | % { $_.LastWriteTime.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss.ffffff tt") } | sort-object
07/08/2021 10:15:57.403067 AM
07/08/2021 10:15:57.403165 AM
07/08/2021 10:15:57.425071 AM
07/08/2021 10:15:57.425950 AM
07/08/2021 10:59:23.698350 AM
07/08/2021 12:44:43.666927 PM
07/08/2021 12:55:35.784985 PM

My 2 cents:

  • This is not a duplicate of #1464. My macOS permissions on /private/tmp are fine, and manually opening a pwsh instances always works.
    • Changing the exception message in dotnet/runtime#36823 won't fix the problem of not showing exception message.
  • Whatever code that is in charge of picking mutex names is using the same mutex name.
  • On Windows, I've seen System.Threading.Mutex throw occasionally if the mutex name is contended.
    • The .ctor() documentation says IOException can happen when some other error happens.
  • Maybe pwsh could make the mutex name more unique across instances?
  • Maybe pwsh could use a retry loop around mutex code that sometimes throws?
Dominant language
C#
Stars
4.4k
Forks
341
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from PowerShell/PSReadLine

All issues in PowerShell/PSReadLine

Similar issues

More C# issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.