Thread-local storage

Thread-local storage (TLS) is a computer programming method that uses static or global memory local to a thread.

TLS is used in some places where ordinary, single-threaded programs would use global variables but where this would be inappropriate in multithreaded cases. An example of such situations is where functions use a global variable to set an error condition (for example the global variable errno used by many functions of the C library). If errno were a global variable, a call of a system function on one thread may overwrite the value previously set by a call of a system function on a different thread, possibly before following code on that different thread could check for the error condition. The solution is to have errno be a variable that looks like it is global, but in fact exists once per thread—i.e., it lives in thread-local storage. A second use case would be multiple threads accumulating information into a global variable. To avoid a race condition, every access to this global variable would have to be protected by a mutex. Alternatively, each thread might accumulate into a thread-local variable (that, by definition, cannot be read from or written to from other threads, implying that there can be no race conditions). Threads then only have to synchronise a final accumulation from their own thread-local variable into a single, truly global variable.

Many systems impose restrictions on the size of the thread-local memory block, in fact often rather tight limits. On the other hand, if a system can provide at least a memory address (pointer) sized variable thread-local, then this allows the use of arbitrarily sized memory blocks in a thread-local manner, by allocating such a memory block dynamically and storing the memory address of that block in the thread-local variable.

The application programming interface (API) function TlsAlloc can be used to obtain an unused TLS slot index; the TLS slot index will then be considered ‘used’.

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