how can i know whether a linux syscall is thread safe?
c, linux, multithreading, system-calls, thread-safety
Solution
I think you mean "library functions"; syscalls should, by virtue of operating on the thread's kernel-side data, be thread-safe.
And the answer is: check the manual pages for the functions in question. The "_r" variants are provided specifically for functions which were non-reentrant, meaning that the extra parameters passed to them were statically declared and modified in the non-"_r" versions.
Most of glibc should be, IIRC, thread-safe, but you always need to check manual pages; or, if you don't trust those, the code itself. There's no silver bullet that will remove from you the responsibility of understanding the interfaces which you are programming against.
Problem
some functions in linux mark "thread safe" by _r (e.g. gmtime_r ) but most of the syscalls are not be marked and also not mentioned in manpages. So my question is : How can i konw whether a linux syscall is thread safe? Thank you!