Re: Thread Local Storage?

The platform that I am currently experiencing the issue on is Ubuntu Linux
64bit 13.04, using GCC 4.8.

If I just have a few pointers to some containers, would it be safe to
simply add those pointers to the 'roots'?

You say that there might be performance problems with approach 1? I only
have a few TLS pointers, do you think this would have any kind of
performance impact?  Since I (re)instantiate these pointers for every
thread, I would assume that I would have to "mark" every instance of these
pointers?  Would the performance hit start to grow, then, as new threads
are created and points are marked?

On a slightly related note, your approach 2 has me wondering if there is
some other generic call back (not specific to roots) that I can set for
before (and maybe after) a GC occurs.  (It would help debug things that
happen specifically at a GC).


On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 12:09 AM, Bruce Hoult <[email protected]> wrote:

> Fundamentally, someone needs to make sure that the thread local storage is
> added to the root areas the GC scans pointers from.
>
> Ideally, the standard GC would do that. I don't know what your system is
> and therefore whether it is practical for the GC to locate the TLS global
> areas.
>
> But you can do it yourself.
>
> There are two approaches:
>
> 1) for fixed size areas (or even individual pointer variables) you can
> call GC_add_roots(low_address, high_address) on as many areas as necessary.
> You can also remove these areas if necessary. Or remove and re-add if they
> change size. See gc.h
>
> 2) for things that change often during execution, it can be better to
> point GC_push_other_roots at your own function, which will be called near
> the start of every GC. Your function should call e.g. GC_push_all(bottom,
> top) on each appropriate area you want the GC to scan from. Make sure you
> save the old value of GC_push_other_roots before installing your function,
> and call it too. This is all defined in include/private/gc_priv.h
>
> Unless you see performance problems, it's safer to stick to approach 1).
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 5:20 PM, The Devils Jester <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I have a couple of stl containers that hold pointers to classes which
>> inherit from gc.  The containers are created via a template that includes
>> the gc_allocator.  This has worked great for quite awhile, however I have
>> recently made a couple of the containers thread local using __thread.  When
>> I do this, however, (while still in my main thread and never having created
>> a new thread), at some arbitrary point (maybe when GC kicks in?) my
>> container size goes from whatever it was, to zero.
>>
>>
>> I can remove the __thread from the containers and everything works as
>> desired, for an indefinite period of time, but adding __thread back in,
>> always causes the same issue.  Is there some special initialization I need
>> to do to allow for __thread (and similar) to work correctly in the GC?
>>
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