Forcing release of CriticalSection/Mutex

[abachler]

I have a system service that will use a mutex to control access to shared memory. Now what I need to do is have some mechanism so that I can foreably release the mutex object in case some application that acquires it then crashes without releasing it. This service will be used by multiple applications, so failing to release the mutex would effectivly deadlock the service and all the applications that access it. Any ideas, complaints, recipes for disaster?

[Codeplug]

If it's really crashing (and exiting) then you should be getting WAIT_ABANDONED. Make sure all your wait function calls on that mutext handle it.

If it's "hung", then I don't know of much you can do - other than track down the owning thread/process and kill with prejudice But that's kind of extreme.

gg

[abachler]

Im thinking have it set soem variable to its threadID and KillThread()

[matsp]

But how do you determine that the thread is "ready to be killed" rather than just "taking a long time to do something"?

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Mats