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+[[meta copyright="Copyright © 2008, 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc."]]
+
+[[meta license="""[[toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[toggleable
+id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
+document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
+any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
+Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the license
+is included in the section entitled
+[[GNU_Free_Documentation_License|/fdl]]."]]"""]]
+
+[[meta title="Fix libdiskfs Locking Issues"]]
+
+Nowadays the most often encountered cause of Hurd crashes seems to be lockups
+in the [[hurd/translator/ext2fs]] server.  One of these could be traced
+recently, and turned out to be a lock inside [[hurd/libdiskfs]] that was taken
+and not released in some cases.  There is reason to believe that there are more
+faulty paths causing these lockups.
+
+The task is systematically checking the [[hurd/libdiskfs]] code for this kind of locking
+issues. To achieve this, some kind of test harness has to be implemented: For
+exmple instrumenting the code to check locking correctness constantly at
+runtime. Or implementing a unit testing framework that explicitely checks
+locking in various code paths. (The latter could serve as a template for
+implementing unit checks in other parts of the Hurd codebase...)
+
+This task requires experience with debugging locking issues in multithreaded
+applications.
+
+Possible mentors: ?
+
+Exercise: Hack libdiskfs to keep count of the number of locks currently held.