ronnie sahlberg wrote:
> Feel free to reverse that change.
>   
If time permits, I'll try to improve this.
> It was part of an effort to start refactoring the code so that it
> would eventually become possible to multithread wireshark,   but the
> work required to implement everything required is just too massive to
> be realistic.
>   

Well, my feeling about this is that this goal is a huge amount of work - 
unrealistic for a single person - but maybe not unrealistic for the 
whole devel team.

The requirements that arise from the horizon seems to be pointing in 
that direction:
- loading multiple files into one Wireshark instance
- make use of multitasking "Core" processors while loading capture files

I would *love* to see this change, although I agree this will be a huge 
amount of work.

In the background of the huge amount of dissectors we have nowadays, the 
only way to achieve this is to work step-by-step.

As almost every dissector will be involved, the only realistic approach 
in my eyes would be an approach I would call "blooming". The "changed" 
dissectors will exist for a long time in parallel to the "old" 
dissectors. The "blooming" approach means we'll have to "bloom" from the 
bottom to the top (e.g. Ethernet to HTTP) - while the Ethernet dissector 
is already thread safe, the upper IP/TCP/HTTP dissectors are still "old 
style".

This means the supporting libraries will have to have two sets of API 
calls, the new thread safe and the old "classic" one.

I don't know if there's enough motivation in the community to follow 
this approach - to bring this task to a real life ...

Regards, ULFL
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