More quality quality

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 1:52 PM, Daniel van Vugt 
<daniel.van.vugt at canonical.com> wrote:
> All,
> 
> I'd like (in the somewhat distant future) for us to be able to run 
> Mir's tests under helgrind [1] so that we can automatically detect 
> races in continuous integration.
> 
> It's not going to be a short journey, as there's a fair amount of 
> errors to fix yet. They're mostly benign but the noise easily hides 
> real bugs. So in the mean time, if you write any new code that 
> crosses multiple threads, please try to run your individual test 
> cases under helgrind and check no new races are being introduced.

If we want to use helgrind seriously we should probably fix some of its 
more glaring shortcomings. In particular, it doesn't understand 
std::atomic and doesn't appear to understand std::condition_variable, 
which means it generates a _lot_ of false positives for code that's 
transparently correct.