Re: [Boost-users] Get "Native" thread id - feature request

Thank you for your hints. Well, it isn't just question of SetThreadName function on Windows. The ability to get the real thread id is quite crucial when you want to debug or when you want to log also thread behaviour. On linux you are also interested in real pids. I mean it would be really great if you could also set thread names (and get thread names) directly using boost (and not using those undocumented windows functions), but I don't know if there is some general way how to do it on any OS, so I don't know if it would be "feasible" to put it in boost. On the other hand, getting only thread ids can be done on any OS (as far as I know). So at least this functionality would be nice to have in boost. Zachary Turner wrote:

On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 9:02 AM, Ondrej Sluciak mailto:ondrej.sluciak@nt.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:

Hello, is there a way how to get the thread id that system assigns to thread? I mean the id that is located in "thread_info->id". It would quite nice if boost could return this value, because for example if I want to set name of the thread on windows using function SetThreadName(), I need exactly that id. In my application I would have to add this "feature" directly to boost::thread.hpp, which is not very nice solution. I know that also GetThreadName(myThread->native_handle()) should work, but if I do it like this I always get a Windows error "The procedure entry point GetThreadId could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll". And I also guess, that this new "feature" wouldn't destroy the overall design of boost::thread architecture. To get the "real" thread id is in my opinion in general a useful thing.

The reason is that GetThreadId only exists on 2003/Vista+. There is an undocumented way to do what you want, and it requires using NtQueryInformationThread which is undocumented. To use it you need to manually LoadLibrary / GetProcAddress. The output parameter of this function is another undocumented structure which contains the thread id. Nevertheless, look into it and I think you'll find at least something that works, even if it's ugly.

That being said, I agree the thread id is important sometimes, if we have ability to get the handle there's no reason we shouldn't have the ability to get the id also. ------------------------------------------------------------------------

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