[fpc-devel] Question regarding thread finalization

[Sven Barth]

On 27.11.2010 18:12, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
>
> Pierre muller has a better solution.
>
> He uses TLS callbacks. His solution is finished, but is in need of testing.
> If you want, I can send you his patch, and then you can test it too.
>

Yes, I'd like to test that. Especially as I'm curious how he's done that :D

> As for the DoneThread: your solution number 3 is the one to take. It is
> by far the safest. We'll need to implement it anyway like that
> to fix the case of the TLS done callback and the DLL_DETACH_THREAD.
>

Great :D

Regards,
Sven

> Michael.
>
> On Sat, 27 Nov 2010, Sven Barth wrote:
>
>> Hello together!
>>
>> As you might now, I'm working on a (according to Michael maybe
>> temporary) solution for the clean up of external threads (see
>> http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=17300 ).
>>
>> My current state is that the collector thread which is used inside a
>> "program" is working correctly and now I'm going to tackle the problem
>> of DLLs.
>>
>> I've looked at the necessary include files some time now and I might
>> have spotted a potential problem with thread finalization in DLLs.
>>
>> Consider the following: in a DLL we start a thread and once it has
>> done its duty we call "EndThread" and return from the thread method
>> (I'm thinking in terms of "BeginThread" not "TThread" for this example).
>> After we've returned from the method Windows will call our DLL's entry
>> point (and that of any other loaded DLL) with DLL_THREAD_DETACH where
>> we call "DoneThread" because the current thread is not the "main"
>> thread (another interesting story...).
>> The call of "DoneThread" is decorated with a comment "Assume
>> everything is idempotent there". I'm hereby proposing that this
>> assumption is not correct.
>>
>> I've looked at "EndThread" and "DoneThread". "EndThread" calls the
>> thread manager's "EndThread" method which on Windows calls
>> "DoneThread"(!) and the API method "ExitThread".
>>
>> "DoneThread" finalizes the RTL for that thread and starts with the
>> WideString manager (not looked into that) and continues with the heap.
>> Now the first thing the heap does is getting the address of its
>> "freelists" record (which is a threadvar!) and plays around a bit with
>> its contents (not really important for this discussion). "DoneThread"
>> then continues finalizing other parts of the RTL and finally calls the
>> thread managers "ReleaseThreadVars" method.
>>
>> I sincerely hope that every alarm bell rings now. By calling
>> "DoneThread" twice in a DLL we are basically accessing already freed
>> memory: the thread var data.
>>
>> As this is a very serious problem I now ask you how this should be
>> solved:
>> 1) keep it as it is (I hope not O.o)
>> 2) fullfill the assumption and check the code which is called by
>> "DoneThread" to be idempotent (which can break again at any time)
>> 3) stop assuming that "DoneThread" is idempotent and do some checks
>> here. E.g. by checking whether TlsGetValue(TLSKey) is Nil before
>> calling "DoneThread" in DLL_THREAD_DETACH, which means that a) the RTL
>> was never initialised (a thread that was created before
>> DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH and never called into the DLL's code - see below)
>> or b) the thread was already finalized.
>>
>> Problem 3a is the following:
>> A thread is created in an application. Now the main thread loads a FPC
>> library and some time after that the thread exits (it has never called
>> any method in the DLL). Now the DLL receives a DLL_THREAD_DETACH and
>> currently blindly finalizes a never initialized RTL (because it has
>> never received a DLL_THREAD_ATTACH call for this thread!).
>>
>> Modifying the RTL in this way might also solve the external thread
>> problem for DLLs (I still have to think that one through, though).
>>
>> Regards,
>> Sven
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