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GStaticMutex and AIX

If you use GLib on non-Linux platforms such as AIX and think that G_STATIC_MUTEX_INIT does nothing but zero-initialize the mutex, think twice. Although quite clearly stated in the documentation, I thought I was smarter and used a GStaticMutex embedded in a structure that was zero initialized.

If you look at the definition of G_STATIC_MUTEX_INIT on most platforms (Linux, Solaris, BSDs), it contains nothing but zeroes. This lead me to the impression that zero filling a GStaticMutex instance is enough to initialize it.

In reality it isn't. On AIX this renders the mutex to be entirely useless without warnings or aborts. The results are of course bugs that are difficult to track down and fix.

This took me an entire day to figure out, as the SQL driver in syslog-ng had this problem. This was fixed since, but if you are running syslog-ng on AIX with the SQL driver, be sure to have this patch applied.

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