For purposes of thread local cleanup I need to create an assertion that checks if the current thread was created via boost::thread. How can I can check if this was the case? That is, how can I check if the current thread is handled by boost::thread?
I simply need this to do a cleanup of thread local storage when the thread exits. Boost's thread_local_ptr appears to only work if the thread itself is a boost thread.
Note that I'm not doing the check at cleanup time, but sometime during the life of the thread. Some function calls one of our API/callbacks (indirectly) causing me to allocate thread-local storage. Only boost threads are allowed to do this, so I need to detect at that moment if the thread is not a boost thread.
Refer to Destruction of static class members in Thread local storage for the problem of not having a generic cleanup handler. I answered that and realized pthread_clenaup_push won't actually work: it isn't called on a clean exit form the thread.
While I don't have answer to detect a boost thread the chosen answer does solve the root of my problem. Boost thread_specific_ptr's will call their cleanup in any pthread. It must have been something else causing it not to work for me, as an isolated test shows that it does work.
The premise for your question is mistaken :) boost::thread_specific_ptr works even if the thread is not a boost thread. Think about it -- how would thread specific storage for the main thread work, seeing as it's impossible for it to be created by boost? I have used boost::thread_specific_ptr from the main thread fine, and although I haven't examined boost::thread_specific_ptr's implementation, the most obvious way of implementing it would work even for non-boost threads. Most operating systems let you get a unique ID number for the current thread, which you can then use as an index into a map/array/hashtable.
More likely you have a different bug that prevents the behavior you're expecting to see from happening. You should open a separate question with a small compilable code sample illustrating the unexpected behavior.
You can't do this with a static assertion: That would mean you could detect it at compile time, and that's impossible.
Assuming you mean a runtime check though:
If you don't mix boost::thread with other methods, then the problem just goes away. Any libraries that are creating threads should already be dealing with their own threads automatically (or per a shutdown function the API documents that you must call).
Otherwise you can keep, for example, a container of all pthread_ts you create not using boost::thread and check if the thread is in the container when shutting down. If it's not in the container then it was created using boost::thread.
EDIT: Instead of trying to detect if it was created with boost::thread, have you considered setting up your application so that the API callback can only occur in threads created with boost::thread? This way you prevent the problem up front and eliminate the need for a check that, if it even exists, would be painful to implement.
Each time a boost thread ends, all the Thread Specific Data gets cleaned. TSD is a pointer, calling delete p* at destruction/reset.
Optionally, instead of delete p*, a cleanup handler can get called for each item. That handler is specified on the TLS constructor, and you can use the cleanup function to do the one time cleaning.
#include <iostream>
#include <boost/thread/thread.hpp>
#include <boost/thread/tss.hpp>
void cleanup(int* _ignored) {
std::cout << "TLS cleanup" << std::endl;
}
void thread_func() {
boost::thread_specific_ptr<int> x(cleanup);
x.reset((int*)1); // Force cleanup to be called on this thread
std::cout << "Thread begin" << std::endl;
}
int main(int argc, char** argv) {
boost::thread::thread t(thread_func);
t.join();
return 0;
}
Related
I am recently working with threads in C++11. now I am thinking about how to force stop a thread. I couldn't find it on stackoverflow, and also tried these.
One variable each thread : not so reliable
return in the main thread : I have to force quit only one not all
and I have no more ideas. I have heard about WinAPI, but I want a portable solution. (that also means I wont use fork())
Can you please give me a solution of this? I really want to do it.
One of the biggest problems with force closing a thread in C++ is the RAII violation.
When a function (and subsequently, a thread), gracefully finishes, everything it held is gracefully cleaned up by the destructors of the objects the functions/threads created.
Memory gets freed,
OS resources (handles, file descriptors etc.) are closed and returned to the OS
Locks are getting unlocked so other threads can use the shared resources they protect.
other important tasks are preformed (such as updating counters, logging, etc.).
If you brutally kill a thread (aka by TerminateThread on Windows, for example), non of these actually happen, and the program is left in a very dangerous state.
A (not-so) common pattern that can be used is to register a "cancellation token" on which you can monitor and gracefully shut the thread if other thread asks so (a la TPL/PPL). something like
auto cancellationToken = std::make_shared<std::atomic_bool>();
cancellationToken->store(false);
class ThreadTerminator : public std::exception{/*...*/};
std::thread thread([cancellationToken]{
try{
//... do things
if (cancellationToken->load()){
//somone asked the thred to close
throw ThreadTerminator ();
}
//do other things...
if (cancellationToken->load()){
//somone asked the thred to close
throw ThreadTerminator ();
}
//...
}catch(ThreadTerminator){
return;
}
});
Usually, one doesn't even open a new thread for a small task, it's better to think of a multi threaded application as a collection of concurrent tasks and parallel algorithms. one opens a new thread for some long ongoing background task which is usually performed in some sort of a loop (such as, accepting incoming connections).
So, anyway, the cases for asking a small task to be cancelled are rare anyway.
tldr:
Is there a reliable way to force a thread to stop in C++?
No.
Here is my approach for most of my designs:
Think of 2 kinds of Threads:
1) primary - I call main.
2) subsequent - any thread launched by main or any subsequent thread
When I launch std::thread's in C++ (or posix threads in C++):
a) I provide all subsequent threads access to a boolean "done", initialized to false. This bool can be directly passed from main (or indirectly through other mechanisms).
b) All my threads have a regular 'heartbeat', typically with a posix semaphore or std::mutex, sometimes with just a timer, and sometimes simply during normal thread operation.
Note that a 'heartbeat' is not polling.
Also note that checking a boolean is really cheap.
Thus, whenever main wants to shut down, it merely sets done to true and 'join's with the subsequent threads.
On occasion main will also signal any semaphore (prior to join) that a subsequent thread might be waiting on.
And sometimes, a subsequent thread has to let its own subsequent thread know it is time to end.
Here is an example -
main launching a subsequent thread:
std::thread* thrd =
new std::thread(&MyClass_t::threadStart, this, id);
assert(nullptr != thrd);
Note that I pass the this pointer to this launch ... within this class instance is a boolean m_done.
Main Commanding shutdown:
In main thread, of course, all I do is
m_done = true;
In a subsequent thread (and in this design, all are using the same critical section):
void threadStart(uint id) {
std::cout << id << " " << std::flush; // thread announce
do {
doOnce(id); // the critical section is in this method
}while(!m_done); // exit when done
}
And finally, at an outer scope, main invokes the join.
Perhaps the take away is - when designing a threaded system, you should also design the system shut down, not just add it on.
I am using ZThreads to illustrate the question but my question applies to PThreads, Boost Threads and other such threading libraries in C++.
class MyClass: public Runnable
{
public:
void run()
{
while(1)
{
}
}
}
I now launch this as follows:
MyClass *myClass = new MyClass();
Thread t1(myClass);
Is it now possible to kill (violently if necessary) this thread? I can do this for sure instead of the infinite loop I had a Thread::Sleep(100000) that is, if it is blocking. But can I kill a spinning thread (doing computation). If yes, how? If not, why not?
As far as Windows goes (from MSDN):
TerminateThread is a dangerous function that should only be used in
the most extreme cases. You should call TerminateThread only if you
know exactly what the target thread is doing, and you control all of
the code that the target thread could possibly be running at the time
of the termination. For example, TerminateThread can result in the
following problems:
If the target thread owns a critical section, the critical section will not be released.
If the target thread is allocating memory from the heap, the heap lock will not be released.
If the target thread is executing certain kernel32 calls when it is terminated, the kernel32 state for the thread's process could be inconsistent.
If the target thread is manipulating the global state of a shared DLL, the state of the DLL could be destroyed, affecting other users of the DLL.
Boost certainly doesn't have a thread-killing function.
A general solution to the kind of question posted can be found in Herb Sutter article:
Prefer Using Active Objects Instead of Naked Threads
This permits you to have something like this (excerpt from article):
class Active {
public:
typedef function<void()> Message;
private:
Active( const Active& ); // no copying
void operator=( const Active& ); // no copying
bool done; // le flag
message_queue<Message> mq; // le queue
unique_ptr<thread> thd; // le thread
void Run() {
while( !done ) {
Message msg = mq.receive();
msg(); // execute message
} // note: last message sets done to true
}
In the active object destructor you can have then:
~Active() {
Send( [&]{ done = true; } ); ;
thd->join();
}
This solution promotes a clean thread function exist, and avoids all other issues related to an unclean thread termination.
It is possible to terminate a thread forcefully, but the call to do it is going to be platform specific. For example, under Windows you could do it with the TerminateThread function.
Keep in mind that if you use TerminateThread, the thread will not get a chance to release any resources it is using until the program terminates.
If you need to kill a thread, consider using a process instead.
Especially if you tell us that your "thread" is a while (true) loop that may sleep for a long period of time performing operations that are necessarily blocking. To me, that indicate a process-like behavior.
Processes can be terminated in a various number of ways at almost any time and always in a clean way. They may also offer more reliability in case of a crash.
Modern operating systems offer an array of interprocess communications facilities: sockets, pipes, shared memory, memory mapped files ... They may even exchange file descriptors.
Good OSes have copy-on-write mechanism, so processes are cheap to fork.
Note that if your operations can be made in a non-blocking way, then you should use a poll-like mechanism instead. Boost::asio may help there.
You can with TerminateThread() API, but it is not recommended.
More details at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms686717(v=vs.85).aspx
As people already said, there is no portable way to kill a thread, and in some cases not possible at all. If you have control over the code (i.e. can modify it) one of the simplest ways is to have a boolean variable that the thread checks in regular intervals, and if set then terminate the thread as soon as possible.
Can't you do add something like below
do {
//stuff here
} while (!abort)
And check the flag once in a while between computations if they are small and not too long (as in the loop above) or in the middle and abort the computation if it is long?
Not sure of the other libraries but in pthread library pthread_kill function is available pthread_kill
Yes,
Define keepAlive variable as an int .
Initially set the value of keepAlive=1 .
class MyClass: public Runnable
{
public:
void run()
{
while(keepAlive)
{
}
}
}
Now, when every you want to kill thread just set the value of keepAlive=0 .
Q. How this works ?
A. Thread will be live until the execution of the function continuous . So it's pretty simple to Terminate a function . set the value of variable to 0 & it breaks which results in killing of thread . [This is the safest way I found till date] .
According to the C++0x final draft, there's no way to request a thread to terminate. That said, if required we need to implement a do-it-yourself solution.
On the other hand boost::thread provides a mechanism to interrupt a thread in a safe manner.
In your opinion, what's the best solution? Designing your own cooperative 'interruption mechanism' or going native?
All the language specification says that the support isn't built into the language.
boost::thread::interrupt needs some support from the thread function, too:
When the interrupted thread next executes one of the specified interruption points (or if it is currently blocked whilst executing one)
i.e. when the thread function doesn't give the caller a chance to interrupt, you are still stuck.
I'm not sure what you mean with "going native" - there is no native support, unless you are spellbound to boost:threads.
Still, I'd use an explicit mechanism. You have to think about having enough interruption points anyway, why not make them explicit? The extra code is usually marginal in my experience, though you may need to change some waits from single-object to multiple-objects, which - depending on your library - may look uglier.
One could also pull the "don't use exceptions for control flow", but compared to messing around with threads, this is just a guideline.
Using native handle to cancel a thread is a bad option in C++ as you need to destroy all the stack allocated objects. This was the main reason they don't included a cancel operation.
Boost.Thread provides an interrupt mechanism, that needs to pool on any waiting primitive. As this can be expensive as a general mechanism, the standard has not included it.
You will need to implement it by yourself. See my answer here to a similar question on how to implement this by yourself. To complete the solution an interruption should be throw when interrupted is true and the thread should catch this interruption and finish.
Here is my humble implementation of a thread canceller (for C++0x).
I hope it will be useful.
// Class cancellation_point
#include <mutex>
#include <condition_variable>
struct cancelled_error {};
class cancellation_point
{
public:
cancellation_point(): stop_(false) {}
void cancel() {
std::unique_lock<std::mutex> lock(mutex_);
stop_ = true;
cond_.notify_all();
}
template <typename P>
void wait(const P& period) {
std::unique_lock<std::mutex> lock(mutex_);
if (stop_ || cond_.wait_for(lock, period) == std::cv_status::no_timeout) {
stop_ = false;
throw cancelled_error();
}
}
private:
bool stop_;
std::mutex mutex_;
std::condition_variable cond_;
};
// Usage example
#include <thread>
#include <iostream>
class ThreadExample
{
public:
void start() {
thread_ = std::unique_ptr<std::thread>(
new std::thread(std::bind(&ThreadExample::run, this)));
}
void stop() {
cpoint_.cancel();
thread_->join();
}
private:
void run() {
std::cout << "thread started\n";
try {
while (true) {
cpoint_.wait(std::chrono::seconds(1));
}
} catch (const cancelled_error&) {
std::cout << "thread cancelled\n";
}
}
std::unique_ptr<std::thread> thread_;
cancellation_point cpoint_;
};
int main() {
ThreadExample ex;
ex.start();
ex.stop();
return 0;
}
It is unsafe to terminate a thread preemptively because the state of the entire process becomes indeterminate after that point. The thread might have acquired a critical section prior to being terminated. That critical section will now never be released. The heap could become permanently locked, and so on.
The boost::thread::interrupt solution works by asking nicely. It will only interrupt a thread doing something thats interruptible, like waiting on a Boost.Thread condition variable, or if the thread does one of these things after interrupt is called. Even then, the thread isn't unceremoniously put through the meat grinder as, say, Win32's TerminateThread function does, it simply induces an exception, which, if you've been a well-behaved coder and used RAII everywhere, will clean up after itself and gracefully exit the thread.
Implementing a do-it-yourself solution makes the most sense, and it really should not be that hard to do. You will need a shared variable that you read/write synchronously, indicating whether the thread is being asked to terminate, and your thread periodically reads from this variable when it is in a state where it can safely be interrupted. When you want to interrupt a thread, you simply write synchronously to this variable, and then you join the thread. Assuming it cooperates appropriately, it should notice that that the variable has been written and shut down, resulting in the join function no longer blocking.
If you were to go native, you would not gain anything by it; you would simply throw out all the benefits of a standard and cross-platform OOP threading mechanism. In order for your code to be correct, the thread would need to shut down cooperatively, which implies the communication described above.
Its unsafe to terminate a thread, since you would have no control over the state of any data-structures is was working on at that moment.
If you want to interrupt a running thread, you have to implement your own mechanism. IMHO if you need that, your design is not prepared for multiple threads.
If you just want to wait for a thread to finish, use join() or a future.
My implementation of threads uses the pimpl idiom, and in the Impl class I have one version for each OS I support and also one that uses boost, so I can decide which one to use when building the project.
I decided to make two classes: one is Thread, which has only the basic, OS-provided, services; and the other is SafeThread, which inherits from Thread and has method for collaborative interruption.
Thread has a terminate() method that does an intrusive termination. It is a virtual method which is overloaded in SafeThread, where it signals an event object. There's a (static) yeld() method which the running thread should call from time to time; this methods checks if the event object is signaled and, if yes, throws an exception caught at the caller of the thread entry point, thereby terminating the thread. When it does so it signals a second event object so the caller of terminate() can know that the thread was safely stopped.
For cases in which there's a risk of deadlock, SafeThread::terminate() can accept a timeout parameter. If the timeout expires, it calls Thread::terminate(), thus killing intrusively the thread. This is a last-resource when you have something you can't control (like a third-party API) or in situations in which a deadlock does more damage than resource leaks and the like.
Hope this'll be useful for your decision and will give you a clear enough picture about my design choices. If not, I can post code fragments to clarify if you want.
I agree with this decision. For example, .NET allows to abort any worker thread, and I never use this feature and don't recommend to do this to any professional programmer. I want to decide myself, when a worker thread may be interrupted, and what is the way to do this. It is different for hardware, I/O, UI and other threads. If thread may be stopped at any place, this may cause undefined program behavior with resource management, transactions etc.
How can I wait for a detached thread to finish in C++?
I don't care about an exit status, I just want to know whether or not the thread has finished.
I'm trying to provide a synchronous wrapper around an asynchronous thirdarty tool. The problem is a weird race condition crash involving a callback. The progression is:
I call the thirdparty, and register a callback
when the thirdparty finishes, it notifies me using the callback -- in a detached thread I have no real control over.
I want the thread from (1) to wait until (2) is called.
I want to wrap this in a mechanism that provides a blocking call. So far, I have:
class Wait {
public:
void callback() {
pthread_mutex_lock(&m_mutex);
m_done = true;
pthread_cond_broadcast(&m_cond);
pthread_mutex_unlock(&m_mutex);
}
void wait() {
pthread_mutex_lock(&m_mutex);
while (!m_done) {
pthread_cond_wait(&m_cond, &m_mutex);
}
pthread_mutex_unlock(&m_mutex);
}
private:
pthread_mutex_t m_mutex;
pthread_cond_t m_cond;
bool m_done;
};
// elsewhere...
Wait waiter;
thirdparty_utility(&waiter);
waiter.wait();
As far as I can tell, this should work, and it usually does, but sometimes it crashes. As far as I can determine from the corefile, my guess as to the problem is this:
When the callback broadcasts the end of m_done, the wait thread wakes up
The wait thread is now done here, and Wait is destroyed. All of Wait's members are destroyed, including the mutex and cond.
The callback thread tries to continue from the broadcast point, but is now using memory that's been released, which results in memory corruption.
When the callback thread tries to return (above the level of my poor callback method), the program crashes (usually with a SIGSEGV, but I've seen SIGILL a couple of times).
I've tried a lot of different mechanisms to try to fix this, but none of them solve the problem. I still see occasional crashes.
EDIT: More details:
This is part of a massively multithreaded application, so creating a static Wait isn't practical.
I ran a test, creating Wait on the heap, and deliberately leaking the memory (i.e. the Wait objects are never deallocated), and that resulted in no crashes. So I'm sure it's a problem of Wait being deallocated too soon.
I've also tried a test with a sleep(5) after the unlock in wait, and that also produced no crashes. I hate to rely on a kludge like that though.
EDIT: ThirdParty details:
I didn't think this was relevant at first, but the more I think about it, the more I think it's the real problem:
The thirdparty stuff I mentioned, and why I have no control over the thread: this is using CORBA.
So, it's possible that CORBA is holding onto a reference to my object longer than intended.
Yes, I believe that what you're describing is happening (race condition on deallocate). One quick way to fix this is to create a static instance of Wait, one that won't get destroyed. This will work as long as you don't need to have more than one waiter at the same time.
You will also permanently use that memory, it will not deallocate. But it doesn't look like that's too bad.
The main issue is that it's hard to coordinate lifetimes of your thread communication constructs between threads: you will always need at least one leftover communication construct to communicate when it is safe to destroy (at least in languages without garbage collection, like C++).
EDIT:
See comments for some ideas about refcounting with a global mutex.
To the best of my knowledge there's no portable way to directly ask a thread if its done running (i.e. no pthread_ function). What you are doing is the right way to do it, at least as far as having a condition that you signal. If you are seeing crashes that you are sure are due to the Wait object is being deallocated when the thread that creates it quits (and not some other subtle locking issue -- all too common), the issue is that you need to make sure the Wait isn't being deallocated, by managing from a thread other than the one that does the notification. Put it in global memory or dynamically allocate it and share it with that thread. Most simply don't have the thread being waited on own the memory for the Wait, have the thread doing the waiting own it.
Are you initializing and destroying the mutex and condition var properly?
Wait::Wait()
{
pthread_mutex_init(&m_mutex, NULL);
pthread_cond_init(&m_cond, NULL);
m_done = false;
}
Wait::~Wait()
{
assert(m_done);
pthread_mutex_destroy(&m_mutex);
pthread_cond_destroy(&m_cond);
}
Make sure that you aren't prematurely destroying the Wait object -- if it gets destroyed in one thread while the other thread still needs it, you'll get a race condition that will likely result in a segfault. I'd recommend making it a global static variable that gets constructed on program initialization (before main()) and gets destroyed on program exit.
If your assumption is correct then third party module appears to be buggy and you need to come up with some kind of hack to make your application work.
Static Wait is not feasible. How about Wait pool (it even may grow on demand)? Is you application using thread pool to run?
Although there will still be a chance that same Wait will be reused while third party module is still using it. But you can minimize such chance by properly queing vacant Waits in your pool.
Disclaimer: I am in no way an expert in thread safety, so consider this post as a suggestion from a layman.
Is the following safe?
I am new to threading and I want to delegate a time consuming process to a separate thread in my C++ program.
Using the boost libraries I have written code something like this:
thrd = new boost::thread(boost::bind(&myclass::mymethod, this, &finished_flag);
Where finished_flag is a boolean member of my class. When the thread is finished it sets the value and the main loop of my program checks for a change in that value.
I assume that this is okay because I only ever start one thread, and that thread is the only thing that changes the value (except for when it is initialised before I start the thread)
So is this okay, or am I missing something, and need to use locks and mutexes, etc
You never mentioned the type of finished_flag...
If it's a straight bool, then it might work, but it's certainly bad practice, for several reasons. First, some compilers will cache the reads of the finished_flag variable, since the compiler doesn't always pick up the fact that it's being written to by another thread. You can get around this by declaring the bool volatile, but that's taking us in the wrong direction. Even if reads and writes are happening as you'd expect, there's nothing to stop the OS scheduler from interleaving the two threads half way through a read / write. That might not be such a problem here where you have one read and one write op in separate threads, but it's a good idea to start as you mean to carry on.
If, on the other hand it's a thread-safe type, like a CEvent in MFC (or equivilent in boost) then you should be fine. This is the best approach: use thread-safe synchronization objects for inter-thread communication, even for simple flags.
Instead of using a member variable to signal that the thread is done, why not use a condition? You are already are using the boost libraries, and condition is part of the thread library.
Check it out. It allows the worker thread to 'signal' that is has finished, and the main thread can check during execution if the condition has been signaled and then do whatever it needs to do with the completed work. There are examples in the link.
As a general case I would neve make the assumption that a resource will only be modified by the thread. You might know what it is for, however someone else might not - causing no ends of grief as the main thread thinks that the work is done and tries to access data that is not correct! It might even delete it while the worker thread is still using it, and causing the app to crash. Using a condition will help this.
Looking at the thread documentation, you could also call thread.timed_join in the main thread. timed_join will wait for a specified amount for the thread to 'join' (join means that the thread has finsihed)
I don't mean to be presumptive, but it seems like the purpose of your finished_flag variable is to pause the main thread (at some point) until the thread thrd has completed.
The easiest way to do this is to use boost::thread::join
// launch the thread...
thrd = new boost::thread(boost::bind(&myclass::mymethod, this, &finished_flag);
// ... do other things maybe ...
// wait for the thread to complete
thrd.join();
If you really want to get into the details of communication between threads via shared memory, even declaring a variable volatile won't be enough, even if the compiler does use appropriate access semantics to ensure that it won't get a stale version of data after checking the flag. The CPU can issue reads and writes out of order as long (x86 usually doesn't, but PPC definitely does) and there is nothing in C++9x that allows the compiler to generate code to order memory accesses appropriately.
Herb Sutter's Effective Concurrency series has an extremely in depth look at how the C++ world intersects the multicore/multiprocessor world.
Having the thread set a flag (or signal an event) before it exits is a race condition. The thread has not necessarily returned to the OS yet, and may still be executing.
For example, consider a program that loads a dynamic library (pseudocode):
lib = loadLibrary("someLibrary");
fun = getFunction("someFunction");
fun();
unloadLibrary(lib);
And let's suppose that this library uses your thread:
void someFunction() {
volatile bool finished_flag = false;
thrd = new boost::thread(boost::bind(&myclass::mymethod, this, &finished_flag);
while(!finished_flag) { // ignore the polling loop, it's besides the point
sleep();
}
delete thrd;
}
void myclass::mymethod() {
// do stuff
finished_flag = true;
}
When myclass::mymethod() sets finished_flag to true, myclass::mymethod() hasn't returned yet. At the very least, it still has to execute a "return" instruction of some sort (if not much more: destructors, exception handler management, etc.). If the thread executing myclass::mymethod() gets pre-empted before that point, someFunction() will return to the calling program, and the calling program will unload the library. When the thread executing myclass::mymethod() gets scheduled to run again, the address containing the "return" instruction is no longer valid, and the program crashes.
The solution would be for someFunction() to call thrd->join() before returning. This would ensure that the thread has returned to the OS and is no longer executing.