Multiple Threads using Codec Engine Handle

Within a process, all threads can technically share the same Engine handle returned from Engine_open(). However, as documented in the Engine_open() API Reference Guide, this Engine handle is not thread-safe, meaning only one thread should use it at a time.

The common and recommended usage for multi-threaded applications is to, rather than have one thread obtain Engine handle and share it, have each thread independently call Engine_open() to obtain its own Engine handle. As expected, before exiting, each thread should also call Engine_close().

The order is not important. In homogeneous multicore systems, the slave will be loaded when the first thread calls Engine_open(); other Engine_open() calls will return unique Engine handles, and increment a reference count on the slave device. Once the last thread calls Engine_close(), the reference count will reach zero and the slave will be unloaded/stopped.

Finally, note that these details are all local to a single process. When multiple applications may need to use a slave processor, they should be configured to use the Link Arbiter Daemon - LAD.