Multithreading

The libebd.a, libcx.a, libm.a and libC.a libraries have been made thread-safe in order to support multithreaded actors. This is managed by the library in the following way:

• by protecting shared variables with mutexes and using threadOnce() to initialize these mutexes

• by using the Private Data library to maintain private variables per thread (for errno management, see the next section)

Defining errno as one global variable for the actor is not suitable for multithreaded actors as situations can arise where a thread, examining errno on return from a failed system call, concludes that the call failed for the wrong reason because the global errno was changed by another system call in another thread in the meantime. Some programs also test errno rather than system call return values to detect errors.

To avoid this, the header file errno.h, exported by the extended environment, should be included in any source file using errno. This will result in a separate value for errno for each thread.