[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] avcodec thread safety fix

Art Clarke aclarke
Fri May 29 18:15:11 CEST 2009


On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 11:15 AM, Andreas ?man <andreas at lonelycoder.com> wrote:
> Fair enough. Here is another variant.

Great idea by the way; I was just sitting down this morning to put
together a similar patch.  A few comments:

- You don't actually provide a call to create the mutex or delete the
mutex but you provide op codes for that.  My suggestion is to add a
call to create the mutex when someone sets the callback (right AFTER
you set the global callback pointer) and require them to ensure they
set the callback in a single-thread.  The other option is to create it
in avcodec_register_all, but that would require people to have set the
callback BEFORE calling avcodec_register_all which would violate the
requirement that avcodec_register_all come first.

- In this case the mutex you're using lives for the entire time the
libavcodec shared library is loaded or executable is running, so your
delete lock call really should only come when the library unloads.
Since there is no way to provide that hook safely that I know of, you
should add docs comment letting people know that delete is not
guaranteed to be called.  (In case you're wondering, yes there are
some situations where unloading libavcodec would be desired, but
that's a different topic).

- Not for this patch, but ideas for later.  The locking avcodec_open
and avcodec_close in libavcodec/utils.c is (AFAIK) protecting the
specific AVCodec implementation so it can open and close without any
other thread ON THE SAME CODEC accidentally initializing static
AVCodec lookup tables and the like.  Therefore once you have the ideas
of mutexes in your API (good suggestion Michael), the lock in utils.c
should be on a member of AVCodec rather than a static (and therefore
global across all codecs) variable which would slightly increase
throughput.  The risk here is that I'm wrong and that lock is
protecting more than the AVCodec's specific initialization.

- Art

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