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Hi Guys,
I am after some advice. I currently have a thread which is blocked which i require to kill. I have spent ages looking around and although i have read it shouldn't be done but its the only way around what i've gotta do.
My Question is how do i kill this blocked thread?
Any help or guidance would be great
Cheers
Dan
What sort of system/threading library are you using? Nobody will be able to help you very much without that sort of info...
On which Operating System? Windows, Mac, *nix ?
On Windows you should be able to use the TerminateThread() function...
TerminateThread Function (Windows)
Hi, sorry we are using pthreads on Linux POSIX.
Thanks Dan.
This is the kinda thing i am after for pthreads on Linux POSIXQuote:
Originally Posted by CommonTater
Did you look at pthread_cancel?
EDIT: or pthread_kill. There's a whole list of pthread functions (and a decent general reference) here: https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/pthreads/.
>> I currently have a thread which is blocked which i require to kill.
"Killing" is rarely the answer. Where is it "blocked"?
gg
Kill works from within itselft but not from another thread, cancel has no effect :-(.
Essentially we want to kill from another thread. i dunno if killing is right way, but basically we need to stop the tread that is running.
thanks again for any ideas
Dan
Did you actually look into pthread_kill? Not only does the prototype show a thread ID parameter, suggesting you can kill a thread other than the current one, the description states it explicitly:
Quote:
Originally Posted by man pthread_kill
You should never need to call pthread_kill() in a properly written application. If your thread has conditions where it blocks, then you need to wake it up and have it return cleanly from the thread procedure function.
Agreed pthread_kill is not ideal, but I wouldn't say that one "should never need to call" it. It simply sends an asynchronous signal to another thread. Sending something like SIGKILL would actually terminate the whole process, but sending something like SIGUSR1 would be, IMO, a completely acceptable solution to asynchronous thread communication. The signal handler for that signal could call cleanup code followed by pthread_exit. Besides, pthread_cancel is at the mercy of the thread being cancelled, which is an attribute set by the thread itself. This is probably not the case, but the OP may not have control over those parts of the code that caused the rogue thread to block, and since it's blocking, that thread can't make itself cancelable if it currently isn't, and can't necessarily unblock itself. I still agree that well written code should avoid potential blocking issues, but that doesn't necessarily solve the OP's problem.
I've never seen a threading problem where the solution is to kill the thread. In fact, many modern implementations of pthread_kill() will outright crash the application.Quote:
Originally Posted by anduril462
Indeed, I've never used pthread_kill myself (though I'm not a frequent user of pthreads). The crash is only an issue if you're signalling an already closed thread though. As the the discussion mentions, "In NPTL pthread_t is a pointer to the thread's control structure, that is freed after either the thread has been pthread_join'ed, or has exited when in detached state. Accessing it afterwards is similar to passing a fclosed FILE * descriptor to fwrite, etc.". Nobody would advocate "never calling fwrite" because of this. The caller simply must be mindful of the state of that thread ID before calling pthread_kill. It also allows asynchronous behavior, which can't be accommodated by any other method that I'm aware of.
@danderton: Is this an academic exercise where the point is actually to kill another thread, or is this a practical problem, where you have a blocked thread that you don't know how to handle? How exactly is it "blocking"? Is it stuck on a blocking I/O call? Is it blocked on a condition variable (e.g. using pthread_cond_wait)?
- If the point is strictly to kill a thread other than the current one, then pthread_cancel or pthread_kill may be what you have to do.
- If it is blocked using pthread_cond_wait, look into pthread_cond_signal
- If it is blocked by something like an I/O operation, you may want to look into using non-blocking I/O with a select to eliminate the blocking.