[fpc-devel] OO rewrite - technical questions

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Mon, 19 Jul 2010, schreef Michael Schnell:

> On 07/19/2010 03:11 PM, Jonas Maebe wrote:
>> That's correct. FPC has largely platform-independent support for 
>> threadvars, which is much more heavy-weight than simply using a segment 
>> register (indirect procedure call depending on the thread manager, get 
>> thread local storage pointer, index local storage with offset specific to 
>> the threadvar).
> Nonetheless in the end a register is needed to be used that is preloaded with 
> different values for different threads. Otherwise a thread can't know which 
> one it is. Registers is the only per-Thread information that is granted to 
> persist by the OS during preemption.

You could also work with the current thread id as a key to a pointer to 
the threadvars. However, segment registers are indeed the way libpthread 
resolves the TLS keys.

>> There have been attempts to get the segment register approach to work on 
>> Windows, but afaik it always crashed on at least one Windows version.
> YAK
>
> I do know that gcc in Linux on X86  uses a segment register. I don't know how 
> gcc works in Windows, but I suppose even Windows is assumed to restore all 
> register values of a thread  after a preemption.

Yes, though I am still puzzled how it works on x86_64; it seems regvars 
there are also accessed using fs, but x86_64 prevents you from writing to 
segment registers.

Daniël