Give a name to a boost thread?

Question

Is it possible to give a name to a boost::thread so that the debuggers tables and the crash logs can be more readable? How?

Answer 1

You would need to access the underlying thread primitive and assign a name in a system dependent manner. Debugging and crash logs are inherently system dependent and boost::thread is more about non-system-dependency, i.e. about portability.

It seems ( http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_43_0/doc/html/thread.html ) that there is no documented way to access underlying system resources for a boost thread. (But I have never used it myself so I may miss something.)

Edit: (As David writes in the comment) http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_43_0/doc/html/thread/thread_management.html#thread.thread_management.thread.nativehandle

Answer 2

I'm using boost 1.50.0 on Win32 + VS2010 and thread::native_handle contains number which I didn't manage to pair to anything in system. On the other hand, the thread::get_id() method returns directly windows thread ID in form of a hexadecimal string. Notice that the value returned is platform specific, though. The following code does work under Boost 1.50.0 + Win32 + VS2010. Parts of code reused from msdn

const DWORD MS_VC_EXCEPTION = 0x406D1388;
#pragma pack(push, 8)
typedef struct THREADNAME_INFO {
    DWORD dwType; // Must be 0x1000.
    LPCSTR szName; // Pointer to name (in user addr space).
    DWORD dwThreadID; // Thread ID (-1=caller thread).
    DWORD dwFlags; // Reserved for future use, must be zero.
} THREADNAME_INFO;
#pragma pack(pop)

void _SetThreadName(DWORD threadId, const char* threadName) {
    THREADNAME_INFO info;
    info.dwType = 0x1000;
    info.szName = threadName;
    info.dwThreadID = threadId;
    info.dwFlags = 0;
    __try {
        RaiseException( MS_VC_EXCEPTION, 0, sizeof(info)/sizeof(ULONG_PTR), (ULONG_PTR*)&info );
    }
    __except(EXCEPTION_EXECUTE_HANDLER) {
    }
}
void SetThreadName(boost::thread::id threadId, std::string threadName) {
    // convert string to char*
    const char* cchar = threadName.c_str();
    // convert HEX string to DWORD
    unsigned int dwThreadId;
    std::stringstream ss;
    ss << std::hex << threadId;
    ss >> dwThreadId;
    // set thread name
    _SetThreadName((DWORD)dwThreadId, cchar);
}

Call like this:

boost::thread* thr = new boost::thread(boost::bind(...));
SetThreadName(thr->get_id(), "MyName");