[Boost-users] [Thread] Trying to share a mutex between objects

From: Adam Nielsen (adam.nielsen_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-07-11 02:12:45

Hi all,

I'm having some trouble getting my head around Boost mutexes and how 
they work.

Basically I have a handful of objects, and they all use a shared 
resource (a C-style function.)  The function isn't thread-safe, so I 
want to protect it to ensure only one thread at a time can call it.

My idea was to create a mutex for this (lock before the call, unlock 
after it), but I'm having trouble working out how to share the mutex 
between all the objects.  The boost::mutex object seems like what I 
want, but it's non-copyable so I can't share it among multiple objects. 
  I tried passing around references to the mutex instead, but this just 
triggers an assertion failure when I try to lock it.

Should I be using boost::mutex for this?  How would you normally 
serialise access among different objects like this?  I'm finding the 
examples somewhat tricky to work from, as most of them use global 
variables and C-style functions for creating threads, which doesn't 
really fit with the C++ model of my program - I could just make the 
mutex a global variable but it doesn't seem like the cleanest solution 
to me.

Any pointers would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Adam.