Question

I was trying to figure out shared memory and tried to write a simple program involving a consumer and a producer. I didnt make it to the consumer part and found this weird little problem: The parent will return at the *spool=3; with no rhyme or reason on why. Nothing on dmesg.

#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <errno.h>

#define PRODUCER_ERROR(msg)         \
    do {perror("Producer Error: " msg "\n"); exit(1); }while(0)

#define SHM_NAME "/my_sharedmem"

void producer();

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    pid_t pID = fork();
    if (pID == 0) {
    // Code only executed by child process
    printf ("Son here\n");
    return 0;
    } else if (pID < 0) {
    perror("Unable to fork\n");
    exit(1);
    } else {
    // Code only executed by parent process
    printf ("Parent here\n");
        producer();
    return 0;
    }

    return 0;
}


void producer()
{
    int fd, d;
    unsigned* spool;

    printf("<<Producer>> started\n");
    fd = shm_open(SHM_NAME, O_CREAT | O_RDWR,  S_IRWXU | S_IRWXG | S_IRWXO ); // FIXED

    printf ("<<Producer>> memory file opened\n");

    spool = mmap(NULL, sizeof(unsigned), PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE | PROT_EXEC, MAP_SHARED, fd, 0);
    printf ("<<Producer>> mmaped to %p\n\tGonna write.\n", spool);
    perror(NULL);

    *spool = 3;
    // msync(spool, sizeof(unsigned), MS_SYNC | MS_INVALIDATE);

    printf("<<Producer>> ended\n");
}

EDIT: fixed shm_open mode argument

Answer 1

You have the mode argument to shm_open wrong. This is supposed to be a mode specification as for open. Probably your version here by conincidence forbids writing to the address, so the process then crashes when you try to write to it.

BTW: you should always check the return of library calls such as shm_open and mmap.

Edit: As I also observed in a comment below, you are also missing to scale the segment to an appropriate size with ftruncate.