this might be off topic, but let's try:
I have a dll that is not thread safe (i.e. has many global variables, about 500). I have the sources for the dll. The target is to make it thread safe.
Moving all the variables to thread specific storage is very complicated. Making it thread safe on ansi C level is very, very complicated too. I guess that you thoroughly deal with PE format.
Is there a way to play with executable sections, such that every thread will use it's own copy of the data?
I know one guy, that claimed that he has achieved this with 20 lines of code by directly modifying smth in executable, he doesn't want to tell me what he has done :(
I also heard of __attribute((section... in gcc that should do the work (I am generally talking about windoze platform only), can you explain me what does it do in gcc?
thank you in advance,
Michael Zayats
"Michael Zayats" zmichael@regard.co.il wrote:
I have a dll that is not thread safe (i.e. has many global variables, about 500). I have the sources for the dll. The target is to make it thread safe.
Moving all the variables to thread specific storage is very complicated. Making it thread safe on ansi C level is very, very complicated too. I guess that you thoroughly deal with PE format.
Is there a way to play with executable sections, such that every thread will use it's own copy of the data?
I know one guy, that claimed that he has achieved this with 20 lines of code by directly modifying smth in executable, he doesn't want to tell me what he has done :(
I also heard of __attribute((section... in gcc that should do the work (I am generally talking about windoze platform only), can you explain me what does it do in gcc?
All you need is to place all initialized data you want to make thread safe to a separate section and then place a pointer to that data in the PE header [IMAGE_FILE_THREAD_LOCAL_STORAGE]. Creating custom section is an easy part, but I don't know how to fulfill the second part with gcc.
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Dmitry Timoshkov -
Michael Zayats