On Tuesday, February 08, 2005 at 1:54 AM, Guy Harris wrote:
Mark Pizzolato wrote:
> I didn't know this. I had assumed that since ethereal was a multi
> threaded program
Not all platforms on which Ethereal runs support threading well. We
make no pthread calls in Ethereal (we don't define KAXLIB_POSIX_THREADS,
so even the exceptions package doesn't make pthread calls), nor do we
make any Windows threading calls - with GTK+ 2.x, threading is done for
taps *if* USE_THREADS is defined, but I don't think we define it.
Hmmm.. I was only talking about windows, which shows ethereal having 4
running threads as soon as the interface comes up (before doing any capture
activites) on my Win2K box, but now when I look at the thread count on a
WinXP box there is only 1 thread. If I click on Capture->Start to bring up
the Ethereal Capture Options dialog (but don't click on anything), the Win2K
box still shows 4 thread, but the WinXP box now shows 2 threads. Strange.
By the way, I'm observing the thread count on both systems with Task
Manager.
Note that in some versions of BSD, threading and BPF devices - which are
what's used for packet capture on BSD systems - don't work well together.
Yes, I 've run into this on some BSD variants and thus avoided using threads
where it didn't work..
- Mark Pizzolato
