Bionic Buffalo Tech Note #49: Thread Support in the
gibraltar
Object Request Broker
The
gibraltar
Global Environment
Note: The information in this section is implementation specific, and portable applications should not
rely on it.
All state information, data structures, tables, and run-time information owned by
gibraltar
are kept
in, or linked from, the global environment. The global environment is a structure, so-named to
distinguish it from the individual thread environments. By following pointers from the global
environment, all of the thread environments can be found, as can the tables allowing lookup of object
information from object references. The global environment is found by dereferencing a global pointer.
A mutex protects the pointer and the linked global environment data structures.
A thread's
CORBA_Environment
is a substructure within the associated thread environment
structure.
A key (from
pthread_key_create()
) is associated with the addresses of the thread environment
structures. Each thread can locate its own thread environment structure (if any) by applying
pthread_getspecific()
to the key. This is cheaper than walking the data structures from the
global environment, and doesn't require that the global environment be locked during the lookup
operation.
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