When multiple SBY processes run in parallel (from a Makefile or other
job-server aware tool) and each SBY process runs tasks in parallel, each
with enough tasks to be limited by the total job count, it is possible
for the processes to race in such a way that every SBY process's helper
process is in a blocking read from the job-server but a job-token would
only become available as soon as any SBY process exits.
In that situation SBY doesn't actually need the job-token anymore and
only previously requested it as there was opportunity for parallelism.
It would immediatly return the token as soon as it is acquired. That's
usually sufficient to deal with no-longer-needed-but-requested tokens,
but when SBY is done, it needs to return the job-token held by the
parent process ASAP which it can only do by actually exiting, so we need
to interrupt the blocking read of SBY's helper process.
This could be done by sending a signal to the helper process, except
that Python made the decision in 3.5 to have automatic EINTR retry loops
around most system calls with no opt-out. That was part of the reason to
go with this specifc helper process design that avoids interrupting a
blocking read in the first place.
Using an exception raised from the signal handler instead might lose a
token when the signal arrives after the read returns, but before the
token is stored in a variable. You cannot recover from a lost token in
the context of the job-server protocol, so that's not an option. (This
can't happen with recent Python versions but that would depend on
undocumented behavior that could plausibly change again.)
Thankfully the only case where we need to interrupt the read is when SBY
is about to exit and will not request any further tokens. This allows us
to use a signal handler that uses dup2 to close and replace the
read-from fd with one that already is at EOF, making the next retry
return immediatly. (If we'd need to interrupt a read and continue
running we could also do this but the fd shuffling would be more
involved.)
Move parser generation into a seperate file to avoid import issues with bad python modules during docs gen.
With the requirements.txt provided to readthedocs, there shouldn't need to be any other changes?
Also I've never been able to run `make test` so I'm not actually sure if the changes break sby, but they shouldn't.
When using the -f argument be more forgiving with the expectation of a clean
workspace and the expectation of the new sby run being responsible for
directory creation.
This is a usability and quality of life improvement for Windows users where
the OS can implement file and directory locking implicitly. In the EDA world
it is common to have multiple tools in use at any one time and it can become
tortious to have to close files / exit 3rd party applications to release
locking so sby is happy to rerun.
This change will prevent sby claiming a terminal error has occurred when it
fails to create a directory that already exists. It also now considers the
environment to be 'clean' (as per -f) if all the non-directory elements of
the file tree have been deleted, leaving potentially an empty a skeleton of
directories.
