[Mono-devel-list] RE: [Gc] Boehm GC interaction with other libraries

[Boehm, Hans]

> From: gc-admin at napali.hpl.hp.com [mailto:gc-admin at napali.hpl.hp.com] On Behalf Of eric lindvall
> Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2003 3:03 PM

> I have a few questions about how code that uses the Boehm GC interacts
> with libraries that were not compiled against the Boehm GC
> library/headers.
> 
> I am seeing some odd behaviour when using Platform Invoke 
> (P/Invoke) in
> Mono to invoke native libraries from Mono. From what I can 
> see, it seems
> like there is some sort of memory corruption going on.
> 
> The native library makes use of:
>  - malloc(), free()
>  - pthread_create()
>  - pthread_cond_init(), pthread_cond_signal(), pthread_cond_wait()
>  - sem_init(), sem_wait(), sem_post()
>  - msgsnd(), msgrcv()
> 
> The questions I have are:
> 
> 1. Is memory that I allocate with malloc() in libraries that were not
> compiled against boehm seen by the garbage collector? (will it ever be
> collected out from under me?)
Assuming the GC library was not compiled with -DREDIRECT_MALLOC,
memory allocated with malloc is neither collected nor traced.  The
malloced objects should not disappear out from under you.  The collectable
objects they refer to may.  (The collector tries not to trace malloced
memory.  Under win32, it sometimes ends up tracing it anyway, which is
benign for correctness, but not performance.  It can
never collect memory allocated through the system malloc.)
> 
> 2. Will boehm just "ignore" any threads that were created by
> a version of pthread_create() that was not wrapped by boehm?
I believe that's correct (for the collector, not me personally :-) ),
provided the collector is initialized from the main thread,
and you are not on a platform on which the collector can enuumerate
all threads.  (Currently that happens for win32 with the collector
in its own dll.)  The collector currently needs to know about the
main thread.  (It currently has no way to find the stack base of
an arbitrary thread, and hence "knows" that it is initialized from the
main thread, so that it can register the initializing thread.)

Note that if the ignored threads change pointers in/to the garbage-collected
heap, all bets are off.
> 
> 3. Will anything bad happen if the libraries that I invoke use
> pthread_cond_wait()?
If the collector knows about it, I suspect that the pthread_cond_wait() call may
terminate after the collector stops and restarts the thread.  But that's OK, since
the pthread spec allows that behavior anyway.

Hans