CODEWITHSUNDEEP
clinuxmultithreadingmemoryposix
Falcata
Falcata

Reputation: 707

Do memory mapped objects get freed up automatically after a thread terminates?

I have a few quick questions. If I create a new child thread in C, after the thread has finished its processing and it terminates, do:

Guess I posted too fast. Found the answer to the second question (for future ref): http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-memory-leaks/index.html?ca=drs-

Also I would like to mention that the OS is POSIX compliant.

Thanks, Neco

Upvotes: 2

Views: 189

Answers (2)

wallyk
wallyk

Reputation: 57774

Resources like memory, file handles, mutexs, etc. are not released when a thread exits. However, all process related resources are released when a process exits which includes all those types of objects.

Upvotes: 0

Celada
Celada

Reputation: 22261

As you already found out, the answer to your first question is "no". That goes for objects allocated on the heap too.

There is no parent&child relationship between threads in a process, so "parent thread" is meaningless. But, yes, threads can return a value when they exit. The prototype for a thread's toplevel function is:

void *function(void *);

Observe that the return type is void *. Threads can return a pointer (to anything you like). This return value will be retrieved by any other thread that waits for the returning thread to complete using pthread_join().

Upvotes: 4

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