Threads and fork()
Thursday, November 15th, 2007Combining POSIX threads and the fork() system call can be a bit messy. Here’s some facts you may not be aware of:
- A fork() call only clones the current thread
- This can have unintentional effects
The most noticable effect of this, for aspiring thread users, is that it’s unsafe to start any threads before doing the daemonization double fork().
A less obvious problem, though, is that any locks that are held by threads other than the current thread will remain in a locked state within the child’s context until the heat death of the universe. In situations where there are global background objects that keep locks, this means that doing much beyond an exec() is unsafe and, if that exec() fails, it is unsafe to call exit() if any global destructors touch locks. Use _exit() instead.
