libcurl-thread.3: Consolidate thread safety info

This is a new document to consolidate our thread safety information from
several documents (curl-www:features, libcurl.3, libcurl-tutorial.3).
Each document's section on multi-threading will now point to this one.

1 files changed, 100 insertions, 0 deletions

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+.\" **************************************************************************
+.\" *                                  _   _ ____  _
+.\" *  Project                     ___| | | |  _ \| |
+.\" *                             / __| | | | |_) | |
+.\" *                            | (__| |_| |  _ <| |___
+.\" *                             \___|\___/|_| \_\_____|
+.\" *
+.\" * Copyright (C) 2015, Daniel Stenberg, <daniel@haxx.se>, et al.
+.\" *
+.\" * This software is licensed as described in the file COPYING, which
+.\" * you should have received as part of this distribution. The terms
+.\" * are also available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/copyright.html.
+.\" *
+.\" * You may opt to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute and/or sell
+.\" * copies of the Software, and permit persons to whom the Software is
+.\" * furnished to do so, under the terms of the COPYING file.
+.\" *
+.\" * This software is distributed on an "AS IS" basis, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY
+.\" * KIND, either express or implied.
+.\" *
+.\" **************************************************************************
+.\"
+.TH libcurl-thread 3 "13 Jul 2015" "libcurl" "libcurl thread safety"
+.SH NAME
+libcurl-thread \- libcurl thread safety
+.SH "Multi-threading Issues"
+libcurl is thread safe with the following exceptions:
+
+Do \fBNOT\fP use library functions to access or modify the same handle
+concurrently from multiple threads. If concurrent access to the same handle
+from multiple threads could be an issue then you must implement your own
+locking to ensure it won't happen.
+
+Shared objects. You can share certain data between multiple handles by using
+the share interface but you must implement your own locking and set
+\fIcurl_share_setopt(3)\fP CURLSHOPT_LOCKFUNC and CURLSHOPT_UNLOCKFUNC.
+
+SSL/TLS handlers. If you are accessing HTTPS or FTPS URLs in a multi-threaded
+manner, you are then of course using the underlying SSL library multi-threaded
+and those libs might have their own requirements on this issue. You may need to
+provide one or two functions to allow it to function properly:
+
+.RS
+.IP OpenSSL
+
+ http://www.openssl.org/docs/crypto/threads.html#DESCRIPTION
+
+ http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/opensslthreadlock.html
+
+.IP GnuTLS
+
+ http://gnutls.org/manual/html_node/Thread-safety.html
+
+.IP NSS
+
+ is claimed to be thread-safe already without anything required.
+
+.IP PolarSSL
+
+ Required actions unknown.
+
+.IP yassl
+
+ Required actions unknown.
+
+.IP axTLS
+
+ Required actions unknown.
+
+.IP Secure-Transport
+
+ The engine is fully thread-safe, and no additional steps are required.
+.RE
+
+Signals. Signals are used for timing out name resolves (during DNS lookup) -
+when built without using either the c-ares or threaded resolver backends. When
+using multiple threads you should set the \fICURLOPT_NOSIGNAL(3)\fP option to 1
+for all handles. Everything will or might work fine except that timeouts are
+not honored during the DNS lookup - which you can work around by building
+libcurl with c-ares support. c-ares is a library that provides asynchronous
+name resolves. On some platforms, libcurl simply will not function properly
+multi-threaded unless this option is set.
+
+gethostby* functions and other system calls. These functions, provided by your
+operating system, must be thread safe. It is very important that libcurl can
+find and use thread safe versions of these and other system calls, as otherwise
+it can't function fully thread safe. Some operating systems are known to have
+faulty thread implementations. We have previously received problem reports on
+*BSD (at least in the past, they may be working fine these days). Some
+operating systems that are known to have solid and working thread support are
+Linux, Solaris and Windows.
+
+curl_global_* functions. These functions are not thread safe. If you are using
+libcurl with multiple threads it is especially important that before use you
+call \fIcurl_global_init(3)\fP to explicitly initialize the library and its
+dependents, rather than rely on the "lazy" fail-safe initialization that takes
+place the first time \fIcurl_easy_init(3)\fP is called. For an in-depth
+explanation refer to \fIlibcurl(3)\fP section \fBGLOBAL CONSTANTS\fP.
+
+\fICURLOPT_DNS_USE_GLOBAL_CACHE(3)\fP is not thread-safe.