For Folks Serious about Embedded and Application Development

This page answers questions I have gotten from developers.

(Q) When I try to call txThread::yield() within a function called by a timer event my program segfaults. I have tried to find out why but I have not found the cause yet.

(A) txObject ATK does not allow this. I used to force a crash and print out a message saying this was not allowed. The reason for not allowing yields in timer & io callbacks is because the IO/Timer thread is the driving force for all other threads, and if it is put to sleep the whole system will stop. Future documentation will call this out and I will/should put the print out back in.

This has been addressed in txObject 1.3.6 (or higher). Print out has been put back

(Q) I have trouble understanding txObject ATK memory management. Sometimes it takes some time to figure out whether a method frees a pointer it is given as an argument or whether it leaves that up to the caller.

(A) Yes I know I know, documentation will most certainly answer these types of questions. Hopefully someday in the future I will get time to write an exhaustive tutorial. But in the meantime here are two rules that certainly will help.

If a method signature takes a const then the object does not own the memory, if it takes non-const it does. Same goes for method signatures returning const or non-const.

(Q) When I compile with both HOME_THREAD_SUPPORT and NATIVE_THREAD_SUPPORT flags to use both txObject ATK's Home Grown and Native abstraction thread layer, it works fine on Solaris & Windows, but on Linux my application faults.

(A) I too have had this problem on Linux. It seems that pthreads do not like to have another switching engine running. When I have time I will look into this. For now, use one or the other by turning on/off NATIVE_THREAD_SUPPORT & HOME_THREAD_SUPPORT flags.



(Q) I am having trouble using txObject ATK sockets on Windows 2000. But on Windows NT/XP it works fine. I find that running UDP sockets will throw txObject ATK select loop thread into a spin loop. Any thoughts?

(A) Windows 2000 has a UDP socket select bug where if one sends to a peer and the peer is not there the socket goes errored. Build with compile file WIN2K_UDP_FIX and get Window 2000 patch q263823 from txObject ATK download page or from microsoft.



(Q) Using txObject ATK with ObjectStore 5.1 works fine for all of txObject containers, but I am having problems using txHashTable & txHashMap with ObjectStore 6.0 and higher.

(A) It turns out that ObjectStore 6.0 and higher went through a complete architectural overhaul. While doing so they forced a new behavior which previous releases did not. Excelon Corp. says they will remove this restriction in future releases, but until that I suggest you continue your use of ObjectStore 5.1.

OSTORE 6.0 fix has been add to txObject 1.3.6 (or higher) to get around 6.0's limitations