rosout logging + topic subscription: not thread safe

edit

I believe I have found a threading issue with ros logging.

If a node subscribes to a topic in one thread and logs to rosout in another, a conflict can occur, since the nodes topic list may be altered while the rosout logging traverses it.

The following error is reported:

Unable to report rosout: Set changed size during iteration

And what is worse is that tcpros protocol synchronization is lost:

[ERROR] [1520594758.451498758] [/rosout]: a message of over a gigabyte was predicted in tcpros. that seems highly unlikely, so I'll assume protocol synchronization is lost.

[ERROR] [1520594758.451553409] [/rosout]: Exception thrown when deserializing message of length [0] from [/rosout_test]: Buffer Overrun

[ERROR] [1520594758.451622886] [/rosout]: Exception thrown when deserializing message of length [39] from [/rosout_test]: Buffer Overrun

Are there any locks or similar in place, so I can safely subscribe/unsubscribe to topics?

This python node reproduces the problem:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import rospy
from std_msgs.msg import Float64
from threading import Thread

def topic_callback(msg):
    pass

def my_topic_thread():
    """endless subscribing and unsubscribing to a list of topics"""

    topic_names = ["/some/topic{}".format(i) for i in range(0, 100)]

    while not rospy.is_shutdown():
        rospy.loginfo("subscribing")
        subs = []
        for topic in topic_names:
            subs.append(rospy.Subscriber(topic, Float64, topic_callback))
            rospy.sleep(0.001)

        rospy.loginfo("unsubscribing")
        for sub in subs:
            sub.unregister()

if __name__ == '__main__':

    rospy.init_node('demo')

    topic_thread = Thread(target=my_topic_thread)
    topic_thread.start()

    while not rospy.is_shutdown():
        # This logging fails intermittently, because the nodes
        # topic list is changed during logging
        # Error: protocol synchronization is lost
        rospy.loginfo("dummy message")
        rospy.sleep(0.001)

    topic_thread.join()

kinetic, ubuntu 16.04