Instrumenting multithreaded applications

Does anyone have any experience with or know of any work related to
instrumenting a multithreaded application?


We've got a situation where we want to insert instrumentation into a
multithreaded application (for profiling purposes). We need to use some
form of mutual exclusion since the instrumentation writes to a global data
structure.


The problem is that we may insert instrumentation into a signal handler.
So a thread may enter the instrumentation code and open the appropriate
lock. A signal then fires and transfers control to the signal handler.
The thread then re-enters the instrumentation and deadlocks on a lock it
already owns.


I've already seen a paper by people on the Paradyn project at the Univ. of
Wisconsin called 'Dynamic Instrumentation of Thread Applications' in which
they suggest creating a locking mechanism that won't let a thread block on
or enter a lock that it already has open. Unfortunately this involves
knowledge of the underlying threading package, and I'd like to avoid
opening that can of worms.


-Matthew LeGendre

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