[luau] kicking a threads butt into action

[Charles Lockhart]

I've got an application that consists of three threads:

Thread 1 services a device on the PCI bus, basically reading data from 
the device into buffers in memory.  After it's filled a buffer, it calls 
pthread_cond_signal to start up thread 2, then it goes to sleep for 
greater than a set period.  This thread seems to be working fine.

Thread 2, when woken up, confirms that the data in the buffers is ready 
to process, processes the data into a different set of buffers, calls 
pthread_cond_signal to wake up thread 3, checks to see if there is any 
more work to be done, then if not, goes back to sleep.  This thread also 
seems to be working fine.

Thread 3, when woken up, writes the data to a file, checks to see if 
there's any more work to be done, if not goes back to sleep.  This 
thread is causing me problems.  Every once in a while it just stops 
working.  I've verified that thread 2's calling of pthread_cond_signal 
isn't returning an error.  Also, if I throw in printf's for debugging 
(into thread 3), the problem seems to go away, though for some reason I 
have this idea that maybe it just starts happening less often, but that 
could be the paranoia talking.

So, like, this thread, thread 3, just up and quits doing anything.  If 
it was just taking a long time to do the stuff, I could probably figure 
it out, but it just seems to not be doing anything at all.  Do I need to 
schedule this sucker myself, or what?  Anybody?

Uh, this is RH7.2, tested running both kernel 2.4.18-3 and 
2.4.18-preemptive, the vanilla kernel with the RML preemptive patch.

Thanks,

-Charles