Compile protobuf without pthread

[Sam Van den Steen]

Dear all,

I'm developing some binary instrumentation tools where I use protobuf to save the output. I wrote a Pintool using this and everything works fine. However, I wanted to try DynamoRIO because Pin cannot be used to instrument ARM code. Apparently DynamoRIO cannot be linked against libpthread which protobuf needs.

Is it possible to compile a version of protobuf without pthreads so I don't have to link against it? I found at least one project where it seemed to work, but sadly, the modifications he made to the code are not available anymore.

http://arachnism.blogspot.be/2010/03/compiling-google-protobuf-without.html

I also found multiple > five year old threads in this discussion group (detailing it seemed to be impossible), but I was wondering if it was possible to compile without pthreads for the newer protobuf 3?

Kind regards,

Sam Van den Steen

[Adam Cozzette]

I think it should be possible to build without pthreads if you just make a few minor tweaks. I fiddled around with this a little bit and got something that seems to mostly work on a branch here (though I have not really tested it): https://github.com/acozzette/protobuf/tree/without-pthread

I mostly just had to do the following:

- Update configure.ac to unset HAVE_PTHREAD

- Update stubs/common.cc to provide a no-op implementation of the Mutex class.

Of course this assumes that your application will be single-threaded; if you were to build the code in this configuration and then use threads anyway, things would go wrong because you have data races caused by the lack of real locking.

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[Sam Van den Steen]

Hi Adam,

I checked out your updates and integrated them into my instrumentation tool. This seems to work perfectly, no strange crashes anymore. Of course I will test this more thoroughly in the next few days, but it's certainly promising.

Thanks for the help!

Best,
Sam

Op woensdag 23 november 2016 22:41:47 UTC+1 schreef Adam Cozzette:

I think it should be possible to build without pthreads if you just make a few minor tweaks. I fiddled around with this a little bit and got something that seems to mostly work on a branch here (though I have not really tested it): https://github.com/acozzette/protobuf/tree/without-pthread

I mostly just had to do the following:

- Update configure.ac to unset HAVE_PTHREAD

- Update stubs/common.cc to provide a no-op implementation of the Mutex class.

Of course this assumes that your application will be single-threaded; if you were to build the code in this configuration and then use threads anyway, things would go wrong because you have data races caused by the lack of real locking.

On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 1:26 AM, Sam Van den Steen <samvand...@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear all,

I'm developing some binary instrumentation tools where I use protobuf to save the output. I wrote a Pintool using this and everything works fine. However, I wanted to try DynamoRIO because Pin cannot be used to instrument ARM code. Apparently DynamoRIO cannot be linked against libpthread which protobuf needs.

Is it possible to compile a version of protobuf without pthreads so I don't have to link against it? I found at least one project where it seemed to work, but sadly, the modifications he made to the code are not available anymore.

http://arachnism.blogspot.be/2010/03/compiling-google-protobuf-without.html

I also found multiple > five year old threads in this discussion group (detailing it seemed to be impossible), but I was wondering if it was possible to compile without pthreads for the newer protobuf 3?

Kind regards,

Sam Van den Steen

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[Adam Cozzette]

Great, I'm glad to hear that it worked! If you want to clean up those changes and make it easier to build in a single-threaded (pthread-free) mode, feel free to send out a pull request for it.

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[Sam Van den Steen]

When I have some time to do this properly, I will definitely do this as it can only help others. Thanks!

Op maandag 28 november 2016 17:16:16 UTC+1 schreef Adam Cozzette: