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Top Forums Programming Problems with shared memory and lists Post 302329708 by mgessner on Monday 29th of June 2009 09:00:38 AM
Old 06-29-2009
Here's the problem: the pointers that malloc() returns are local to the address space of the process that called malloc(). Those values won't mean anything in the context of another process. Hence putting those numbers in shared memory and using them from another process will invoke undefined behaviour. If you're lucky, your program will then crash. If you're not lucky, you might cause a supernova somewhere (a bit of C humour).

So what you need to do is to allocate a separate chunk of shared memory, and write a "malloc" and "free" that use that pool of memory. In other words, you have to write a small memory allocator/deallocator that uses this shared memory pool, and then passes back offsets from. Since all of your objects are the same, this will be pretty trivial.

Notice I said "offsets" and not "addresses". I don't recall anywhere in anything I've ever read that guarantees that the shared memory will be assigned the same address in different processes. Assuming so, and using those values in your lists will likely lead you back to your original problem. So you will have to handle that problem in an intelligent way.

You can write this to be general (will handle any size allocation) or specific (only handles things of your struct Obj type). Either way is fine, but I think the exercise of writing the general will teach you more.

This is a fairly easy task, but there are some things to watch out for. I will give you two:

a) Only ONE process can initialize the shared memory pool. Start that process FIRST, initialize the pool, and THEN start the others. Otherwise, you'll potentially have multiple processes trashing your pool.

b) What happens if a process that is allocating something from this shared pool gets interrupted during the middle of an allocation, and another process also tries to allocate something from this shared pool. Warning: if you do this wrong, Bad Things will happen, and your mother will laugh at you. Note that accessing the list can ALSO lead to the same kinds of problems, because in the general case you don't necessarily know if another cooperating process has manipulated the list.

One other thing: in your post, you had:

Code:
*sh = *head;

This is wrong: a) you don't want to change the contents of sh, and b) you want head to point to sh, not the other way around.

HTH
 

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pthread_rwlockattr_getpshared(3T)										 pthread_rwlockattr_getpshared(3T)

NAME
pthread_rwlockattr_getpshared(), pthread_rwlockattr_setpshared() - get or set the process-shared attribute SYNOPSIS
PARAMETERS
attr Pointer to the read-write lock attributes object whose attributes are to be set/retrieved. pshared This parameter either specifies the new value of the process-shared attribute (set function) or points to the memory loca- tion where the process-shared attribute of attr is to be returned (get function). DESCRIPTION
The attributes object attr must have been previously initialized with the function before these functions are called. Read-Write locks can be used only by threads within the process or shared by threads in multiple processes. The process-shared attribute in a read-write lock attributes object describes who may use the read-write lock. The legal values for the process-shared attribute are: This option permits a read-write lock to be operated upon by any thread that has access to the memory where the read-write lock is allocated. The application is responsible for allocating the read-write lock in memory that multiple processes can access. The read-write lock can only be operated upon by threads created within the same process as the thread that initialized the read-write lock. If threads of differing processes attempt to operate on such read-write lock, the behavior is undefined. The default value of process-shared is is used to set the process-shared attribute in the initialized attributes object attr. The new value of the process-shared attribute of attr is set to the value specified in the pshared parameter. retrieves the value of the process-shared attribute from the read-write lock attributes object attr. The value of the process-shared attribute of attr is returned in the pshared parameter. RETURN VALUE
Upon successful completion, and return zero. Otherwise, an error number is returned to indicate the error (the variable is not set). ERRORS
If any of the following occur, the and functions return the corresponding error number: is not defined and these functions are not supported. For each of the following conditions, if the condition is detected, the and functions return the corresponding error number: The value specified by attr is invalid. The value specified by pshared is not a legal value. The value pshared points to an illegal address. WARNINGS
If a read-write lock is created with the process-shared attribute defined as the cooperating processes should have access to the memory in which the read-write lock is allocated. AUTHOR
and were developed by X/Open. SEE ALSO
pthread_create(3T), pthread_rwlockattr_init(3T), pthread_rwlock_init(3T). STANDARDS CONFORMANCE
Pthread Library pthread_rwlockattr_getpshared(3T)
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