Give a name to a boost thread?

Is it possible to give a name to a boost::thread so that the debuggers tables and the crash logs can be more readable? How?

3 Answers

You would need to access the underlying thread primitive and assign a name in a system dependent manner. Debugging and crash logs are inherently system dependent and boost::thread is more about non-system-dependency, i.e. about portability.

It seems ( ) that there is no documented way to access underlying system resources for a boost thread. (But I have never used it myself so I may miss something.)

Edit: (As David writes in the comment)

I'm using boost 1.50.0 on Win32 + VS2010 and thread::native_handle contains number which I didn't manage to pair to anything in system. On the other hand, the thread::get_id() method returns directly windows thread ID in form of a hexadecimal string. Notice that the value returned is platform specific, though. The following code does work under Boost 1.50.0 + Win32 + VS2010. Parts of code reused from msdn

const DWORD MS_VC_EXCEPTION = 0x406D1388; #pragma pack(push, 8) typedef struct THREADNAME_INFO { DWORD dwType; // Must be 0x1000. LPCSTR szName; // Pointer to name (in user addr space). DWORD dwThreadID; // Thread ID (-1=caller thread). DWORD dwFlags; // Reserved for future use, must be zero. } THREADNAME_INFO; #pragma pack(pop) void _SetThreadName(DWORD threadId, const char* threadName) { THREADNAME_INFO info; info.dwType = 0x1000; info.szName = threadName; info.dwThreadID = threadId; info.dwFlags = 0; __try { RaiseException( MS_VC_EXCEPTION, 0, sizeof(info)/sizeof(ULONG_PTR), (ULONG_PTR*)&info ); } __except(EXCEPTION_EXECUTE_HANDLER) { } } void SetThreadName(boost::thread::id threadId, std::string threadName) { // convert string to char* const char* cchar = threadName.c_str(); // convert HEX string to DWORD unsigned int dwThreadId; std::stringstream ss; ss << std::hex << threadId; ss >> dwThreadId; // set thread name _SetThreadName((DWORD)dwThreadId, cchar); } 

Call like this:

boost::thread* thr = new boost::thread(boost::bind(...)); SetThreadName(thr->get_id(), "MyName"); 

There is a proposal to add this to boost which has had a slow start: