Is it an error to call hGetLine on a non-blocking Handle?

[Alain O'Dea]

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On Tue 06 May 2014 05:35:15 PM UTC, Alain O'Dea wrote:
> On Tue 06 May 2014 04:39:19 PM UTC, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 10:04 PM, Alain O'Dea <alain.odea at gmail.com
>> <mailto:alain.odea at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     I'm trying to get to the bottom of a very tenacious bug in the GHC
>>     Builder.
>>
>>     The details of how this happens are documented separately for
>>     reference:
>>     https://gist.github.com/AlainODea/dc841046524cd7833da8
>>
>>     The Handles involved are returned by
>>     System.Process.runInteractiveProcess.  They are non-blocking at the
>>     Illumos kernel level.
>>
>>     It appears that maybeFillReadBuffer (called by hGetLine under the
>>     hood) treats EAGAIN as an error:
>>
>>     http://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.7.0.0/docs/src/GHC-IO-Handle-Text.html#maybeFillReadBuffer
>>
>>     Is it expected that runInteractiveProcess would return non-blocking
>>     Handles for stdout and stderr?
>>
>>
>> The non-blockingness should be hidden.
>>
>> Your attempt to follow EAGAIN down the programmatic rabbit hole hasn't
>> gotten you nearly far enough, I'm afraid. You stopped at a layer where
>> the underlying non-blocking nature of the IO shouldn't be visible, so
>> it would be inappropriate to check for EAGAIN there. As you'll notice
>> if you follow the breadcrumbs further, it becomes quite difficult to
>> spelunk through the various vtables to see what's really going on.
>>
>> I /think/ that you should be looking at GHC.IO.FD.readRawBufferPtr, as
>> that's where the IO is ultimately happening. The trouble is, it
>> calls throwErrnoIfMinus1RetryMayBlock, which should already be doing
>> the right thing with EAGAIN. Sadly, I don't know what's going wrong
>> here, but I'm sure you will need to go down a level or two of
>> abstraction from where you are now before you'll find the source of
>> the problem.
>
> Thank you Bryan.  I'm probably too low-level with my current DTrace of
> syscalls and definitely too high-level in the GHC sources as you have
> identified.  I'll find my way to the middle here.
>
> I'll take a look at GHC.IO.FD.readRawBufferPtr and
> throwErrorIfMinus1RetryMayBlock.  It appears to be working normally for
> most of the operations, but hits a gap somewhere that allows the
> ResourceExhausted IOError to leak out.

I looked through he readRawBufferPtr and friends and could not see any
obvious gaps for EAGAIN to slip through.  I didn't look as hard as I'd
like, but I was getting a bit lost after a few hours of constructing
possible code paths.

On a whim I tried setting LC_ALL to en_US.UTF-8 and the problem
disappeared.  Does hGetLine have undefined behavior if locale
environment variables (LANG, LC_*) are unset?
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