Use thread sanitizer (tsan) to check data races #452
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Background
Recently, there was an issue about possible data races in the driver's hardware_interface (PR here by @AndyZe).
While critical parts have been spotted, it might be reasonable to run an in-depth investigation.
Approach
In recent versions, GCC has support for thread sanitizer, which seems quite capable of spotting many potential (and actual) race conditions at runtime. Clang has this feature too, but seems to be more difficult to compile-in with a ROS stack.
This PR is not actually going to be merged. Instead, it wanted to start this discussion here. Also because, I didn't manage (yet) to get meaningful output at runtime.
Compilation
The ur_robot_drivers CMakeLists.txt gets some additional build flags and we link dynamically against tsan. This step already works.
Runtime analysis
Unfortunately, I get segmentation faults relatively early on.
Any help is highly welcome!