Summary:
This patch just changes the interface to make starting the thread
multiple times permissable since it will only be done the first time.
Note that this does not refcount it or anything, so it's onto the user
to make sure that they don't shut down the thread before everyone is
done using it. That is the case today because the shutDown portion is
run by a single thread in the destructor phase.
Another question is if we should make this thread truly global state,
because currently it will be private to each plugin instance, so if you
have an AMD and NVIDIA image there will be two, similarly if you have
those inside of a shared library.
5812d0bf8e