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WINCE: problems w/CRITICAL_SECTION
- From: "Craig A. Vanderborgh" <craigv at voxware dot com>
- To: pthreads-win32 at sources dot redhat dot com
- Date: 28 Feb 2003 12:03:06 -0700
- Subject: WINCE: problems w/CRITICAL_SECTION
Hello Ross, John, and pthreads-win32:
Background:
We have a very big and extremely complex pthreads application that is
mature and has been thoroughly tested. Basically, it is a continuous
speech recognizer that operates in real time. We have had it running on
wince for a long while under what I call "craig-threads" - it's a
pthreads subset that lacks condition variable support. I became
interested in using pthreads-win32 to get complete support for condition
variables and a few other things.
Our application does not work correctly on pthreads-win32 though, and
for an interesting reason. It appears that the M$ CriticalSection stuff
isn't working correctly on WINCE, at least for our application. I did
the following experiments:
1. Ran application under pthreads-win32. Result: unexpected hang "way
down there"
2. Ran application under craig-threads w/CreateMutexW and associated
stuff for pthread_mutex_*. Result: works
3. Ran application under craig-threads w/InitializeCriticalSection and
associated stuff for pthread_mutex_*. Result: same exact behavior as 1.
above.
So it would seem that the M$ CRITICAL_SECTION stuff is implicated. I
have read that we will be paying a performance penalty if we have to use
a M$ mutex instead of CRITICAL_SECTION. Is this true, and how bad is
it? Our application uses synchronization objects with a very high
bandwidth, btw. Do you think I should modify pthreads-win32 so that one
could optionally use mutex/WaitForSingleObject in place of
CRITICAL_SECTION? Is there some way I might be able to debug the
CRITICAL_SECTION version(s) of our application? Please advise.
regards,
craig vanderborgh
voxware incorporated