
Lock; literal images 'r' us
While Googling for an obscure Windows function the other day, I came across
this fantastically useful repository of undocumented WinAPI functions, put together by Geoff Chappell. I’m not sure how I hadn’t discovered it before.
One of the functions that immediately caught my eye was LdrLockLoaderLock. I’d previously spent quite a few frustrating hours trying to figure out how to determine whether some code was being executed from DllMain, i.e. while in the loader lock, so I could avoid doing anything dodgy – or indeed, anything at all.
The case I was looking at was some logging library code that was used, amongst other things, to record the fact that DLLs were being unloaded. Unfortunately when this was called from DllMain, it sometimes caused a deadlock, for all the reasons we already know about. The library code was called from lots of DLLs, so it wasn’t feasible to fix all of the call sites, instead I had to make the logging a no-op when it’s not safe.
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