Thread termination/exit handlers

I'd been hunting for a while for a good solution to automatically call cleanup operations on exit from threads I didn't own.  Windows (XP onward) has a pretty straightforward solution if you're working with a DLL, but for pthreads on most other platforms, the solution is not as obvious.

Some folks have been using JNA to allow Java code to be invoked as callbacks from various streaming (video, sound) libraries.  If these callbacks come from threads instantiated from native code, the JVM has to (at least temporarily) map the thread into Java space for the duration of the callback.  If the callbacks are frequent, and always come in on the same native thread, we don't want to incur the mapping overhead on every invocation.  The solution, then is to avoid detaching the thread when the callback finishes.

Now we have a new problem.  When the native thread actually terminates, the JVM has no idea that the thread went away because it's only really got a placeholder Thread object, and hasn't hooked up all the plumbing it normally does to detect that the thread has gone away and clean up/GC the mapped Thread object.  Thus the need for a thread exit handler.  In some cases, you may not care about the minimal object overhead, for instance if you've just got a few native threads.  However, with a lot of threads coming and going (we can't force folks to thread-pool).

Windows

On Windows, if you have a DllMain function defined, you'll get notices when threads and processes attach/detach your DLL's code.  This works out nicely, we can make the VM detach the current thread when we get that message:

// Store thread-local information required to detach the thread
// (in my case, only a JVM reference was required)
// TlsSetValue is only set when we recognize that we need the 
// extra cleanup
static DWORD dwTlsIndex;
BOOL WINAPI DllMain(HINSTANCE hDLL, 
                    DWORD fdwReason, 
                    LPVOID lpvReserved) {
  switch (fdwReason) {
  case DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH:
    dwTlsIndex = TlsAlloc();
    if (dwTlsIndex == TLS_OUT_OF_INDEXES) {
      return FALSE;
    }
    break;
  case DLL_PROCESS_DETACH:
    TlsFree(dwTlsIndex);
    break;
  case DLL_THREAD_ATTACH:
    break;
  case DLL_THREAD_DETACH: {
    extern void detach_thread();
    detach_thread(TlsGetValue(dwTlsIndex));
    break;
  }
  default:
    break;
  }
  return TRUE;
}

 Easy enough.  Note that TlsSetValue is called elsewhere only when the callback decides it doesn't want to detach immediately (rather than every time a native thread attaches).  Callbacks normally detach on exit if they weren't attached to begin with.

POSIX Threads (pthreads)

The pthreads library is a different beast.  Searches for "thread termination handler" don't turn up much, except for the stack-based pthread_cancel_push/pop, which seems to do the right thing, but have to arrive in pairs.  It's actually in the pthreads implementation of thread-local storage that we find a way to attach a termination handler to a given thread.

When you define a given thread-local variable in pthreads (a "key" in pthreads lingo), you can provide a destructor function to be used to clean up the storage...on thread exit.  It was a little hard to find since it's not a thread termination handler per se, but rather a mechanism to clean up thread local storage.  I'd overlooked it several times because I wasn't looking for thread local storage solutions.

// Basic plumbing to create a unique key identifying
// specific thread-local storage
static pthread_key_t key;
static void make_key() {
  extern void detach_thread();
  pthread_key_create(&key, detach_thread);
}

    ...
    // This code gets called whenever we identify that
    // a thread needs detach-on-exit behavior
    static pthread_once_t key_once = PTHREAD_ONCE_INIT;
    pthread_once(&key_once, make_key);
    if (!jvm || pthread_getspecific(key) == NULL) {
      pthread_setspecific(key, jvm);
    }
    ...

Now detach_thread will be called (with the value of the thread-local storage as its single argument) when the thread exits.

And voilà, you have a POSIX thread termination handler.