606102 - Allow XPCOM threads to be given a name visible to the underlying OS

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: XPCOM, enhancement)

Description

[Chris Jones [:cjones] inactive; ni?/f?/r? if you need me]

See bug 606062 comment 0: this can be very useful for gross profiling, because with named threads can simply look at which threads are chewing CPU in a tool like |top| and say, e.g., "oh, that's the Sync thread".

The patch I'm about to attach just adds support for linux.

Comment 1

[Chris Jones [:cjones] inactive; ni?/f?/r? if you need me]

I should add that NSPR is a better place for this code, but I don't have the motivation to attempt a new NSPR interface, and bug 507718 would obsolete that code anyway.

Comment 2

[Chris Jones [:cjones] inactive; ni?/f?/r? if you need me]

Attachment: Add nsIThreadManager.newNamedThread() for creating threads with OS-visible names

Comment 3

[Ben Turner (not reading bugmail, use the needinfo flag!)]

For reference the windows equivalent will need to do something like the chromium code:

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/ipc/chromium/src/base/platform_thread_win.cc#12

Comment 4

[Chris Jones [:cjones] inactive; ni?/f?/r? if you need me]

o_O http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/ipc/chromium/src/base/platform_thread_win.cc#47 .  Surely that can't be serious.

Comment 5

[Benjamin Smedberg]

It's serious, thread names are only stored by the debugger on Windows, not the OS, and that's the documented way of communicating a preferred thread name to the debugger.

Comment 6

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Comment on attachment 484967 [details] [diff] [review]
Add nsIThreadManager.newNamedThread() for creating threads with OS-visible names

I'd kinda prefer to just make this

nsIThread newThread(in unsigned long creationFlags, [optional] in string name)

Or just ditch creationFlags since we're not using it anyway.

But this can wait until after branch, so I'm going to just clear the review flag for now.

Comment 7

[Chris Jones [:cjones] inactive; ni?/f?/r? if you need me]

We did this work in another bug.