Files
systemd/man/threads-aware.xml
Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek 4a3620c55a man: fix advice regarding thread safety of libsystemd
The prohibition to move libsystemd objects between threads was added in
64a7ef8bc0 ('man: be more explicit about thread
safety of sd_journal'). At the time, this was valid, because we were using the
mempool for allocation and it apparently didn't handle access from different
threads. Sadlly, the commit links to a bugzilla entry referenced in the commit
is not publicly visible anymore, so the details are murky. But we stopped using
the mempool in a5d8835c78 ('mempool: only enable
mempool use when linked to libsystemd-shared.so'), with subsequent followup in
b01f31954f ('Turn mempool_enabled() into a weak
symbol'). The restriction added in the man page is not necessary since then.

The text in the man page was arguably incorrect in calling the code
"thread-agnostic". If the code does not support being touched from threads at
all and has global state to tied to the main thread, it is not "agnostic", but
just doesn't support threads.

(I'm looking into https://github.com/systemd/python-systemd/issues/143, and
with the current scheme, the python-systemd module and all python code using
libsystemd would be very hard to use. With the change to free-threaded python
in python3.13, i.e. the replacement of single Global Interpreter Lock by
locking on individual objects, this limitation would become even more
constraining.)
2025-10-04 23:26:47 +02:00

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XML

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE refsect1 PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN"
"http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd">
<!-- SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.1-or-later -->
<refsect1>
<title/>
<para id="strict">All functions listed here are thread-agnostic and only a single thread may operate on a
given object at any given time. Different threads may access the same object at different times. Multiple
independent objects may be used from different threads in parallel.</para>
<para id="safe">All functions listed here are thread-safe and may be called in parallel from multiple threads.</para>
<para id='getenv'>The code described here uses
<citerefentry project='man-pages'><refentrytitle>getenv</refentrytitle><manvolnum>3</manvolnum></citerefentry>,
which is declared to be not multi-thread-safe. This means that the code calling the functions described
here must not call
<citerefentry project='man-pages'><refentrytitle>setenv</refentrytitle><manvolnum>3</manvolnum></citerefentry>
from a parallel thread. It is recommended to only do calls to <function>setenv()</function>
from an early phase of the program when no other threads have been started.</para>
</refsect1>