Event synchronization between two threads in Qt

Question

I have two threads, lets say thread "A" and thread "B". Thread "A" post's custom QEvent to thread "B", and then it should wait till thread "B" processes this event.

What I did so far:

My event class:

class IPCMessageEvent : public QEvent
{
public:
   IPCMessageEvent(QWaitCondition* pConditions) : QEvent(IPC_MESSAGE_RECEIVED)
                                                , mpWaitCondition(pConditions)
   { };
   ~IPCMessageEvent()
   {
      mpWaitCondition->wakeOne();
   };
private:
   QWaitCondition* mpWaitCondition;
};

My thread "A":

QWaitCondition recvCondition;
IPCMessageEvent* pEvent = new IPCMessageEvent(&recvCondition);

QCoreApplication::postEvent(gpApp, pEvent);

QMutex  mutex; 
        mutex.lock();

recvCondition.wait(&mutex, IPC_MESSAGE_WAIT_TIMEOUT);

My thread "B": Processes the received event and destroyes it. ~IPCMessageEvent destructor is called and therefore wakeOne() will be initiated for the recvCondition in thread "A".

Everything seems to work just fine, it's just one thing! It looks like sometimes ~IPCMessageEvent is called sooner then expected...

QCoreApplication::postEvent(gpApp, pEvent);

<---- pEvent is already destroyed here ---->

QMutex mutex; 
       mutex.lock();

So my recvCondition.wait(&mutex, IPC_MESSAGE_WAIT_TIMEOUT); will be locked and will reach the timeout.

Are there any other ways of doing this kind of synchronization? Or maybe someone have any suggestions how to fix/overcome this problem?

Answer 1

Well, you have a classical race condition. Your thread A may is interrupted directly after posting the event and thread B then processes and destroys it. Since notifications of condition variables have only an effect if somebody is already waiting, you miss the notification and thus your block infinitely.

So you need to lock the mutex before posting the event. However, this requires that your thread B also needs to lock this mutex when processing the event. Otherwise, you cannot prevent the race condition as thread B has no reason to wait for anything (or to know that it should "wait" until thread A is ready waiting on the condition variable).

Alternative:

If you use a signal/slot connection between the two threads (or the objects living in the two threads), you can use a Qt::BlockingQueuedConnection. This ensures that thread A blocks after emitting the signal until the event loop in thread B processed it.