Desched signal restart can cause behavior difference in tracee
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Description
On recent rr/wine, I'm seeing most wine recordings exit with a "partial write" error. It turns out wine is using a writev syscall without proper restart logic here: https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/blob/8125687441923e11ffb8918b89f3c0d85040b8e2/dlls/ntdll/unix/server.c#L183-L213. Now, this is essentially a wine bug (for which I will submit a patch to wine upstream), but wine doesn't use signals very much, so in the absence of rr it mostly works fine. With rr however, we get a syscall interrupt every time, because this syscall is blocking, so rr's desched signal fires and causes a syscall restart and tracee behavior difference. I'm thinking we should maybe consider automatically restarting syscalls for the tracee if we know that the interrupt was due to a desched signal in order to try to match the untraced behavior as closely as possible.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by reading the desched-signal and syscall-restart behavior described in the issue, along with Wine's dlls/ntdll/unix/server.c lines 183-213. Determine whether rr can distinguish desched interruptions from other syscall interrupts and define tests showing that traced Wine behavior matches untraced behavior without breaking restart semantics.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- cpp, linux
- Domain
- devtools, operating-systems
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100