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Re: gethostbyname thread-safe?


On Mon, 10 Feb 2003, Ajay Nerurkar wrote:

> Is Cygwin's gethostbyname thread-safe? From a web search I got the
> impression that it wasn't and also that Cygwin does not have its
> reentrant version gethostbyname_r. So, what does one do?
>
> Ajay

Ajay,

Looking at the code (src/winsup/cygwin/net.cc),

964:#ifdef _MT_SAFE
965:#define hostent_buf  _reent_winsup ()->_hostent_buf
966:#else
967:static struct hostent *hostent_buf = NULL;
968:#endif
969:
970:/* exported as gethostbyname: standards? */
971:extern "C" struct hostent *
972:cygwin_gethostbyname (const char *name)

you can see that there is a provision for reentrancy.  However,
src/winsup/cygwin/acconfig.h #undef's _MT_SAFE.  OpenGroup's specification
(<http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/functions/gethostbyaddr.html>)
says that "The gethostbyname() function need not be reentrant."
See <http://wcug.wwu.edu/lists/ipng/199710/msg00002.html> for a good
discussion of gethostbyname() thread-safety issues.

So, your choices for the moment are:
1) build a thread-safe cygwin1.dll for your own use
2) make sure gethostbyname() is only called (and its result used/copied)
   by one thread at a time (using a mutex, for example)
3) implement gethostby{name,addr}_r() yourself and submit a patch

Hope this helps,
	Igor
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
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  -- /usr/games/fortune


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