[mythtv] mytharchive lock file issues

D. Hugh Redelmeier hugh at mimosa.com
Mon Mar 5 05:20:22 UTC 2007


[Perhaps this should be a trac ticket, but I cannot seem to create one.]

mytharchive has been acting up on me, so I did some investigation.

Sometimes a mythburn step fails (I'm vague on how or what), leaving the 
mythburn.lck lock file but no mythburn.py process.  When this happens,
cancel requests are ineffective, and any attempt to archive something
just gets you into the logviewer program, whatching the log make no
further process.  Nothing will ever delete the lock.

For example, we tried to put too much on a DVD and got into that
state.

So there are two problems:
(1) a failure with no proper diagnostic or termination
(2) and then no way to archive after this.

This message was prompted by investigation of problem 2.

I'm not the only one to have experienced this.  See, for example
http://threebit.net/mail-archive/mythtv-users/msg35922.html


The mythburn.lck lockfile logic in mythburn.py has a few problems.

- The checking for and creation of a lock ought to be "atomic".
  Otherwise there can be a race condition.  The conventional way of
  doing this on UNIX-like systems is to try to creat a lockfile
  using, in Python terms,
  	os.open(lockfilepath, O_WRONLY | O_CREAT | O_EXCL)
  If there is already a lockfile, this fails
  Otherwise, it creates one.
  This is atomic.

- the logic of mythburn.py's try ... finally block at lines 3571
  through 3611 seems wrong.  The finally part removes the lock file
  but it may not belong to this process.  Luckilly, the program that
  invokes mythburn.py will not do so if the lock is present.  So this
  case will not come up.  Still, this seems quite wrong.

- the lock file, when present, simply contains the string "lock".  It
  is better to follow the convention that the lock file contains the
  process ID of the owning process.  This allows people and processes
  to determine if a lock is stale: held by a now-dead process.

- It seems to me that each place where the lock is checked should then
  check to see if the lock is stale and act accordingly (break the
  lock if stale, perhaps with a warning).

Once this last step is implemented, my problem 2 will go away.

I started to code changes to mythburn.py but before getting serious,
I'd like to know if the relevant authorities think I'm on the right
track.


More information about the mythtv-dev mailing list