While the original motivation is to exercise the more sophisticated synchronization in the free-threaded builds, TSan can still be useful with the GIL enabled as the codebase has a number of non-trivial pieces of thread synchronization: for example, for pending calls execution, management of thread states, thread joining, interpreter finalization.
As a matter of fact, executing a couple of tests with TSan enabled has already found a number of synchronization issues despite the GIL:
The TSan-related additions are not bug fixes per se, but it might still be useful to backport them, so as to also add TSan-enabled builds on bugfix branches. For the most part, the TSan-related additions are in the test suite, but a number of them have to do with the core interpreter and build process:
addition of a _Py_THREAD_SANITIZER preprocessor variable
addition of a --with-thread-sanitizer configure option
Do you think we should try backporting those changes and add TSan-enabled builds to bugfix branches?
These PRs don’t include the GitHub Actions changes to test thread sanitiser on the CI. Should they?
Our GitHub Actions is getting bigger so we need to keep an eye on resources. We’re hitting an Apple-shaped bottleneck at the moment, but these jobs use Ubuntu and are relatively quick: about 9 minutes for free-threaded and 6 minutes for regular (compared to ~26 mins for Windows); and we’d only be backporting the regular one, so should be fine.
We’re on the regular, free plan, with 20 total concurrent jobs and 5 max concurrent macOS jobs.
I’ve emailed a DevRel at GitHub to ask if they can help out, but in the meantime we’ve removed some less-essential macOS testing: python/cpython#116814.
Speaking as RM for 3.12, given the scope of the proposed changes and that they’re a new build-time opt-in, I’m fine with them going in. (I’d be a little more wary if it turns out we need changes to the runtime to accommodate a ThreadSanitizer run, but that doesn’t seem very likely at this point.)
Ok, we now have a TSan-enabled Github Actions build on 3.12.
For 3.11, given that it will soon stop receiving bug fixes, I’m inclined not to bother after all.
I don’t think there’s much value in running TSan on 3.12. The data races we uncover are probably not worth addressing in 3.12 – I think the fixes are likely to be more risky than leaving most of the 3.12 data races as they are.
