I understand that when a new thread is spawned it must be joined or detached else terminate shall be called, i have the below piece of code which work fine if i join them, but crashes if i call detach instead, I am not able to understand what's going on under the hood.
#include "iostream"
#include "thread"
#include "vector"
#include "algorithm"
#include "iterator"
#include "string"
#include "memory"
using namespace std;
void func() {
cout << " func ";
}
int main(int argc , char** argv)
{
std::vector< std::thread> m_vec;
for(int i = 0; i < 100 ; i++){
m_vec.push_back( std::thread(func));
m_vec[i].detach();
}
return 0;
}
Just detaching a thread doesn't give it permission to outlive the main thread. Once the main thread exits, that's the ballgame; the heap is destroyed, things like cout are cleaned up. Any remaining threads stand a distinct chance of crashing if they do anything before the process as a whole terminates.
If you detach a thread, be prepared to provide your own mechanism for ensuring it does not outlive the main thread.
Related
I have a simple C++11 thread program like below.
Code:
#include <iostream>
#include <thread>
#include <chrono>
#include <atomic>
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
std::cout << "My program starts" << std::endl;
std::atomic<bool> exit_thread(false);
std::thread my_thread = std::thread([&exit_thread]{
do {
std::cout << "Thread is doing something..." << std::endl;
std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::seconds(5));
} while (!exit_thread);
});
std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::seconds(12));
exit_thread = true;
std::cout << "Might have to wait to exit thread" << std::endl;
my_thread.join();
return 0;
}
As you can see above, there is a loop which has a sleep_for which makes the thread sleep for 5 seconds and then it wakes and loops again provided that exit_thread is set to false. Main thread waits for 12 seconds and prepares to exit firstly by setting exit_thread to true and then does a join on the thread. All good until now.
Problem:
Above is okay and works for objective. But there is a "potential problem". If the thread has just now started to sleep then it would take it 4 seconds more before it gets out of sleep to discover that it now needs to exit. This delays the exit process and destruction.
Question:
How to can I make the thread sleep in an interruptible way? So that I can interrupt the sleep and make the thread exit right away instead by cancelling out of sleep instead of waiting for the potential 4 or 3 or 2 seconds.
I think that the solution to this might be achievable using a std::condition_variable? Probably? I am looking for a piece of code to show how.
Note that my code runs on both clang and gcc.
We should be waiting on a condition variable or semaphore instead of sleeping. Here's the minimal change to do that:
#include <atomic>
#include <chrono>
#include <condition_variable>
#include <iostream>
#include <mutex>
#include <thread>
int main()
{
std::cout << "My program starts" << std::endl;
std::atomic<bool> exit_thread(false);
std::condition_variable cv;
std::mutex m;
std::thread my_thread = std::thread([&exit_thread,&cv,&m]{
do {
std::cout << "Thread is doing something..." << std::endl;
{
std::unique_lock<std::mutex> lock(m);
cv.wait_for(lock, std::chrono::seconds(5));
}
} while (!exit_thread);
});
std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::seconds(12));
{
std::lock_guard<std::mutex> guard(m);
exit_thread = true;
}
cv.notify_all();
std::cout << "Thread stops immediately" << std::endl;
my_thread.join();
}
Apparently, we do need the mutex:
Even if the shared variable is atomic, it must be modified under the
mutex in order to correctly publish the modification to the waiting
thread.
I have a simpale program that should create two threads with a function hundler that will run infnite and a main thread.
Whenever I try to do pthread_join or pthread_exit to the main thread (in order to demonstrate that the children threads are still working after pthread_exit from main) there is never seems to be a context switch back to the main thread in order to print the message saying he is ending his job "Goodbye" (even the goodbye message before the thread creation is not printed, so I am not exactly sure what is the problem).Only the function handlers of the threads are printing what they should. I set sleep of 4 secs in the other threads in order to see this message before they start, there should have been a context switch to the only thread available that isn't sleeping (main)..
Here is the code:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <pthread.h>
void *thread(void *vargp) {
sleep(4);
while(1)
printf("First Thread No' %ld\n",pthread_self());
}
void *thread2(void *vargp) {
sleep(4);
while(1)
printf("Second Thread No' %ld\n",pthread_self());
}
int main() {
int j,i = 42;
pthread_t tid, tid2;
printf("Good bye1");
pthread_create(&tid, NULL, thread, (void*)&i);
pthread_create(&tid2, NULL, thread2, (void*)&i);
printf("Good bye");
pthread_exit(NULL);
//pthread_join(tid, (void**)&i);
//pthread_join(tid2, (void**)&j);
}
This program ended with segment fault. Why ?
#include <thread>
void f(){}
int main(){
while(true){
std::thread t(f);
t.join();
}
}
environment: winxp+mingw+gcc4.8
The program should not cause any resource problem, for at the end of each loop, the thread finishes its execution and the thread object is destroyed.
I ran the slightly modified code below on Win 7 64 bit compiled with VS 2013 Update 3. While I was typing this answer, the counter reached more than 880,000 without any error. Therefore, the problem may be with your environment.
#include <thread>
#include <iostream>
void f(){}
int main(){
int i = 0;
while (true){
std::thread t(f);
t.join();
std::cout << ++i << std::endl;
}
}
I am running this very simple program, on Ubuntu 13.04 Desktop, however if I comment out the line sleep_for, it hangs after printing cout from main. Can anyone explain why ? As far as I understand, main is a thread and t is another thread and in this case the mutex manages synchronization for shared cout object.
#include <thread>
#include <iostream>
#include <mutex>
using namespace std;
std::mutex mu;
void show()
{
std::lock_guard<mutex> locker(mu);
cout<<"this is from inside the thread"<<endl;
}
int main()
{
std::thread t(show);
std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::milliseconds(1000));
std::lock_guard<mutex> locker(mu);
cout<<"This is from inside the main"<<endl;
t.join();
return 0;
}
If you change to main function as follows, the code will work as expected:
int main()
{
std::thread t(show);
{
std::lock_guard<mutex> locker(mu);
cout << "This is from inside the main" << endl;
} // automatically release lock
t.join();
}
In your code, there is a unfortunate race condition. If the thread t gets the lock first, everything works fine. But if the main threads gets the lock first, it holds the lock until the end of the main function. That means, the thread t has no chance to get the lock, can't finish and the main thread will block on t.join().
That's just a classic deadlock: The main thread obtains the lock and then blocks on joining the other thread, but the other thread can only join if it manages to obtain the lock.
I just wrote the following code to understand better how Threads work:
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <pthread.h>
int globalVariable = 1;
void *myfunc (void *myvar);
int main (void) {
pthread_t thread1;
int waitms;
while(globalVariable <= 50){
printf("Main function: %d \n", globalVariable);
if (globalVariable==9) {
pthread_create(&thread1, NULL, myfunc, NULL);
pthread_join(thread1, NULL);
}
usleep(300000);
globalVariable++;
}
return 0;
}
void *myfunc (void *myvar){
int waitms;
while(globalVariable<=50) {
printf("Thread1: %d \n", globalVariable);
usleep(300000);
globalVariable++;
}
return 0;
}
The code must print a value of a global variable that is incremented in the main function. When this variable has the value 9, the main function calls a thread, that does the same as the original main function, but without calling another thread.
In the Output I get the first 9 prints of the main function and all the following ones are from the thread. Shouldn't they be mixed? What have I done wrong?
No because you are joining the thread1, so the main thread blocks until thread1 dies. Once thread1 dies it resumes but thread1 has incremented the globalVariable to a point where the main thread exits the first while loop.
Removing the join you will see mixed results, better still would be to move the join outside of the while loop so if thread1 is still alive when the main thread exits the loop it waits... it's most likely going to dead by that time but you should make sure your child threads have finished up before exiting the main thread.