Re: How to request notifications

[Sergiu Ivanov]

Hello,

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 08:47:56PM +0300, Sergiu Ivanov wrote:
> My current goal is to make unionmount go away when the mountee (the
> union-mounted translator) goes away.  From antrik's words (and from
> personal remembering) I know that this could be achieved by listening
> to the MACH_NOTIFY_NO_SENDERS notification on translator's control
> port.  However, I could not find sufficient (for me) information how
> to properly request such a notification.
>
> I looked into hurd/boot/boot.c and libfshelp/start-translator-long.c
> but, unfourtunately, both are handling rather specific cases,
> considerably different from my situation.  By analogy with boot.c, I
> built up the following series of steps:
> 
>   mach_port_allocate (mach_task_self (), MACH_PORT_RIGHT_RECEIVE,
>                       &nosenders_listen_port);
>   mach_port_insert_right (mach_task_self (), nosenders_listen_port,
>                                nosenders_listen_port, 
> MACH_MSG_TYPE_MAKE_SEND);
>   mach_port_request_notification (mach_task_self (), nosenders_listen_port,
>                                   MACH_NOTIFY_NO_SENDERS, 1, 
> nosenders_listen_port,
>                                   MACH_MSG_TYPE_MAKE_SEND_ONCE, &prev);
> 
> However, this series of steps is pretty meaningless, since I never
> specify the port to the mountee, to which I would like to listen for
> notifications.  I tried putting mountee_port and mountee_control (I
> hope the names of the variables make their destination clear) instead
> of nosenders_listen_port in different places, but I am constantly
> receiving and ``invalid port right'' error.
> 
> Could somebody point out an idea of a solution to this problem,
> please?

The solution to this problem was kindly pointed out on the IRC by
antrik and Fredrik.  I was receiving ``invalid port right'' because I
was listening to the wrong notification.  The right notification is
MACH_NOTIFY_DEAD_NAME.  The first two function calls
(mach_port_allocate and mach_port_insert_right) are okay.  The third
call, however, should be like as follows:

  mach_port_request_notification (mach_task_self (), mountee_control,
                                  MACH_NOTIFY_DEAD_NAME, 1, 
nosenders_listen_port,
                                  MACH_MSG_TYPE_MAKE_SEND_ONCE, &prev);

(Of course, the name ``nosenders_listen_port'' is conceptually
invalid, too)

The problem with the ``no senders'' notification was that it should be
(quite naturally) a receive right, while both mountee_{port,control}
are *send* rights.

According the GNU Mach reference manual, MACH_NOTIFY_DEAD_NAME is send
exactly when the port itself is destroyed, while the right remains.
It is not difficult to see that this is exactly the situation I am in.

Great thanks to antrik and Fredrik! :-)

Regards,
scolobb