[PATCH] _fwalk walks through thread local FILE pointer

[Joel Sherrill <joel@OARcorp.com>]

My understanding of the reentrancy code in newlib must have gotten
totally out of sync with reality.  Is there any documentation
I can read to catch up and get educated again?

--joel

Jeff Johnston wrote:
> I think that the stdin/stdout/stderr for the thread should also be 
> walked in addition to the global list for now.  I don't think that 
> should cause problems with Cygwin but if so, we can add an #ifdef check.
 >
> -- Jeff J.
> 
> Thomas Pfaff wrote:
> 
>> Take a look at findfp.c and you will see that all FILE pointers are 
>> hold in _GLOBAL_REENT, therefore _fwalk simply does not walk through 
>> the real FILE pointer list, but through the thread lokal ones which 
>> will contain only stdin, stdout and stderr.
>>
>> The obsolete REENT ptr can be removed but thats Jeffs decision.
>>
>> You can search the list why _GLOBAL_REENT was introduced some time 
>> ago. The former implementation where every thread has its own pointer 
>> list was incorrect, FILE pointers are process global objects.
>>
>> There is still a problem with stdin, stdout and stderr because every 
>> thread has its own buffers for these files. Cygwin has a workaround 
>> for this problem, it maps the thread lokal stdin, stdout and stderr to 
>> _GLOBAL_REENT aka _impure_ptr FILE pointers. I think that this will a 
>> working solution for other platforms as well.
>>
>> Thomas
>>
>> Joel Sherrill wrote:
>>
>>> This isn't right.  You are passed a REENT pointer and cannot
>>> simply ignore it.
>>>
>>> This will break any code that depends upon the existing
>>> behavior.  In RTEMS, we use _fwalk as it exists to
>>> implement sync() and walk each thread's open files.
>>> It is also used as part of the per-thread cleanup
>>> dynamically.
>>>
>>> If you want to have NULL ptr argument imply the global
>>> reent, great but don't break it.
>>>
> 


-- 
Joel Sherrill, Ph.D.             Director of Research & Development
joel@OARcorp.com                 On-Line Applications Research
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