CTRL-C does not quit repl when in infinte loop

[SamSaffron]

Platform in Linux x64

Node version 6.0.0

repro:

% node
> while(true){}

CTRL-C does nothing

Since the process handles SIGINT fine when sent via kill I think this is due to ->Run in v8 somehow blocking all keyboard input.

[Fishrock123]

I'm not sure this is actually possible to fix due to how the repl works.

[addaleax]

I’d like to try and take this one if nobody minds.

[ghost]

I'm pretty sure that there is no way to get back to the repl after an infinite loop. Just CTRL+C twice will quite back to the terminal.

[ghost]

As well as this there almost certainly isn't a fix

[bnoordhuis]

@addaleax You're probably going to have to take a similar approach to what I did in #5904: start a watchdog thread, wake it from the SIGINT signal handler, and (presumably) make it call isolate->TerminateExecution().

I suspect you'll need to insert a C++ stack frame between the REPL and the evaluated code, with a TryCatch try_catch that calls isolate->CancelTerminateExecution() when try_catch.HasTerminated() is true.

If you figure out how to fix the semaphore issue on FreeBSD, let me know. :-)

EDIT: That's for Unices. I don't know how you'd approach this on Windows.

[yorkie]

How about just making Node.js REPL to be a pure proxy/manager to another node ChildProcess, to resolve this issue, just kill that ChildProcess instance, is that simple enough? correct me if I'm wrong :-)

[addaleax]

@bnoordhuis Yep, that sounds about right.

I’d add an option to the vm.runIn(This)Context functions for catching the signal… that doesn’t seem too hard, there’s already a lot in place to support the timeout argument and a lot of the timeout Watchdog class seems reusable.

I don’t have any local access to FreeBSD machines, though… are the CI runs from that PR still available somewhere? And would anything speak against uv_async_send for waking up the thread? That uses only write() under the hood, as far as I can tell.

[addaleax]

@yorkie You mean, having a “front” REPL interface that proxies to another process which does what the current REPL does? That may be possible, but it would probably be a lot more intrusive. Any state would be lost in the case of killing it, so it’s not that big an improvement over the current situation… or am I misunderstanding something?

[yorkie]

@addaleax thanks for your comment, here is my respond :-)

having a “front” REPL interface that proxies to another process which does what the current REPL does?

Yea, exactly.

That may be possible, but it would probably be a lot more intrusive.

Could you please expand what do you mean by intrusive?

Any state would be lost in the case of killing it

Yea, when we externally kill that child process, the state would be get lost. But what's the real case?

[bnoordhuis]

are the CI runs from that PR still available somewhere?

Probably not. I think they're kept around for 30 days. After that, they're deleted.

And would anything speak against uv_async_send for waking up the thread?

Instead of a semaphore? uv_async_send() doesn't claim to be async signal-safe; it should work in practice but that's more of an implementation detail than a guarantee.

[addaleax]

@yorkie

Could you please expand what do you mean by intrusive?

Sure, sorry for being unclear. I just think it would probably be more work to get the default eval of the REPL to use a child process for communication than it would be to catch a signal – I may be wrong about that, of course.

But what's the real case?

Not sure what you mean – the ideal way to resolve Ctrl+C would be to stop execution of the current command and return to the REPL, and still have everything from before it in place (unless, of course, the interrupted command modified something).

[addaleax]

@bnoordhuis

Instead of a semaphore? uv_async_send() doesn't claim to be async signal-safe; it should work in practice but that's more of an implementation detail than a guarantee.

Yes… but if I understood you correctly, uv_sem_post suffers from the reverse problem?

[yorkie]

the ideal way to resolve Ctrl+C would be to stop execution of the current command and return to the REPL, and still have everything from before it in place (unless, of course, the interrupted command modified something).

You are right, just an advice :-)

[bnoordhuis]

if I understood you correctly, uv_sem_post suffers from the reverse problem?

I looked into it just now. uv_sem_post() in #5904 seems to be working properly, it fixes the failing test.

Another test, parallel/test-debug-signal-cluster, is now failing consistently (but only on freebsd) but that test has been extraordinarily flaky in the past; I'm rather distrustful of it.

[SamSaffron]

wow, thank you!