I don’t know what can interrupt user code on the ESP8266 or what might do the interrupting, the documentation is lacking in that area, but something seems to be causing me a timing condition. With a really low time out on an NTP call I seemed to end up in the receive and the timeout code at the same time. The timeout kills the connection and the receive disarms the timeout, so in theory only one should ever be run, but what happens if the timeout occurs between the receive code being called and it actually disarming the timeout? Will the timeout interrupt the receive, kill the connection and then allow the receive code to continue? That is what it looked like, so I did the obvious thing and searched the API for some kind of mutex. No joy, but the whole API isn’t documented so I grepped the SDK libraries for any function name that might be relevant, still no joy. I’ve come to the conclusion the SDK does not provide any such functionality, so I had to get my hands dirty with some assembler…

Armed with a copy of the ‘Tensilica Xtensa Instruction Set Architecture‘ reference manual I tested out the S32C1I operation. The GCC compiler doesn’t know this instruction or the special register it uses (SCOMPARE1), so I wrote something similar and patched the right opcodes into the assembled object file. Unfortunately trying to write to this register reset the device, so it looks like the ESP8266 does not support the ‘Conditional Store Option’, darn.

So, I’m not sure how I ended up at it but I found some Linux kernel code with what appears to offer the solution and forms the basis of my esp8266 mutex code. The code is easy enough to use – declare a mutex_t, call CreateMutux against it, then GetMutex and ReleaseMutex as required.

Code now on GitHub: https://github.com/raburton/esp8266