X-Git-Url: http://git.megacz.com/?p=ghc-hetmet.git;a=blobdiff_plain;f=docs%2Fusers_guide%2Fffi-chap.xml;h=aea2f5eb137c9c7580bdab1b29bcd65f5acb177b;hp=b33e95abb6e67ee60164ad14d23f6f5832745eeb;hb=46809fa91667e952afe016e4cd704b21274241b4;hpb=83d563cb9ede0ba792836e529b1e2929db926355 diff --git a/docs/users_guide/ffi-chap.xml b/docs/users_guide/ffi-chap.xml index b33e95a..aea2f5e 100644 --- a/docs/users_guide/ffi-chap.xml +++ b/docs/users_guide/ffi-chap.xml @@ -6,10 +6,10 @@ Foreign function interface (FFI) - GHC (mostly) conforms to the Haskell 98 Foreign Function Interface - Addendum 1.0, whose definition is available from http://www.haskell.org/. + GHC (mostly) conforms to the Haskell Foreign Function Interface, + whose definition is part of the Haskell Report on http://www.haskell.org/. - To enable FFI support in GHC, give the + FFI support is enabled by default, but can be enabled or disabled explicitly with the flag. GHC implements a number of GHC-specific extensions to the FFI @@ -78,6 +78,86 @@ OK: details see the GHC developer wiki. + + + Interruptible foreign calls + + This concerns the interaction of foreign calls + with Control.Concurrent.throwTo. + Normally when the target of a throwTo is + involved in a foreign call, the exception is not raised + until the call returns, and in the meantime the caller is + blocked. This can result in unresponsiveness, which is + particularly undesirable in the case of user interrupt + (e.g. Control-C). The default behaviour when a Control-C + signal is received (SIGINT on Unix) is to raise + the UserInterrupt exception in the main + thread; if the main thread is blocked in a foreign call at + the time, then the program will not respond to the user + interrupt. + + + + The problem is that it is not possible in general to + interrupt a foreign call safely. However, GHC does provide + a way to interrupt blocking system calls which works for + most system calls on both Unix and Windows. A foreign call + can be annotated with interruptible instead + of safe or unsafe: + + +foreign import ccall interruptible + "sleep" :: CUint -> IO CUint + + + interruptble behaves exactly as + safe, except that when + a throwTo is directed at a thread in an + interruptible foreign call, an OS-specific mechanism will be + used to attempt to cause the foreign call to return: + + + + Unix systems + + + The thread making the foreign call is sent + a SIGPIPE signal + using pthread_kill(). This is + usually enough to cause a blocking system call to + return with EINTR (GHC by default + installs an empty signal handler + for SIGPIPE, to override the + default behaviour which is to terminate the process + immediately). + + + + + Windows systems + + + [Vista and later only] The RTS calls the Win32 + function CancelSynchronousIO, + which will cause a blocking I/O operation to return + with the + error ERROR_OPERATION_ABORTED. + + + + + + If the system call is successfully interrupted, it will + return to Haskell whereupon the exception can be raised. Be + especially careful when + using interruptible that the caller of + the foreign function is prepared to deal with the + consequences of the call being interrupted; on Unix it is + good practice to check for EINTR always, + but on Windows it is not typically necessary to + handle ERROR_OPERATION_ABORTED. + + @@ -484,7 +564,7 @@ int main(int argc, char *argv[]) is platform dependent, but is intended to cause blocking system calls to return immediately with an interrupted error code. The underlying operating system thread is not to be - destroyed. + destroyed. See for more details.