circular buffer and multiple threads

[Talguy]

I am still working on my realtime application for my car that will be running on Minimal Ubuntu and the gtkmm library. My current application runs alright for a singly thread application. I am in the process of multi-threading it (still learning threads). What I thought would be the best way to rewrite the back end was using a single queue shared across three threads. Someone suggested a better method where I would have a circular buffer in each hardware communication thread. The somehow communicate with the circular queues from the main thread to get the oldest data.

My question is how can I communicate from the main thread to a worker to get data from the buffer in a lock less or in the least amount of locks using either pthreads or glibmm::threads?

[Ancient Dragon]

You will have to implement some sort of thread synchronization scheme in order for the threads to access a single commen queue to prevent corruption of the queue data. That means only one thread can access the shared common queue at a time -- all other threads that want to access it will have to wait their turn. If you are not very careful that could cause a deadlock situation.

Creating and using a mutex is one way to do it, assuming your os supports them. Since it supports multithreading then I would imagine it would also support mutexes.

My question is how can I communicate from the main thread to a worker to get data from the buffer in a lock less or in the least amount of locks using either pthreads or glibmm::threads

About all that the main thread can do is set a global variable that indicates new data is available in the queue. Then the threads check the status of that variable and act accordingly. Another possibility is to use signals -- main sets a signal and the threads catch it???? I don't know if that will work or not.

[Talguy]

Thanks for the info. I'll try to do it the easy way by using mutexs and see if that meets my needs.