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this global lock allows certain unlock-type primitives to exclude
mmap/munmap operations which could change the identity of virtual
addresses while references to them still exist.
the original design mistakenly assumed mmap/munmap would conversely
need to exclude the same operations which exclude mmap/munmap, so the
vmlock was implemented as a sort of 'symmetric recursive rwlock'. this
turned out to be unnecessary.
commit 25d12fc0fc51f1fae0f85b4649a6463eb805aa8f already shortened the
interval during which mmap/munmap held their side of the lock, but
left the inappropriate lock design and some inefficiency.
the new design uses a separate function, __vm_wait, which does not
hold any lock itself and only waits for lock users which were already
present when it was called to release the lock. this is sufficient
because of the way operations that need to be excluded are sequenced:
the "unlock-type" operations using the vmlock need only block
mmap/munmap operations that are precipitated by (and thus sequenced
after) the atomic-unlock they perform while holding the vmlock.
this allows for a spectacular lack of synchronization in the __vm_wait
function itself.
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the memory model we use internally for atomics permits plain loads of
values which may be subject to concurrent modification without
requiring that a special load function be used. since a compiler is
free to make transformations that alter the number of loads or the way
in which loads are performed, the compiler is theoretically free to
break this usage. the most obvious concern is with atomic cas
constructs: something of the form tmp=*p;a_cas(p,tmp,f(tmp)); could be
transformed to a_cas(p,*p,f(*p)); where the latter is intended to show
multiple loads of *p whose resulting values might fail to be equal;
this would break the atomicity of the whole operation. but even more
fundamental breakage is possible.
with the changes being made now, objects that may be modified by
atomics are modeled as volatile, and the atomic operations performed
on them by other threads are modeled as asynchronous stores by
hardware which happens to be acting on the request of another thread.
such modeling of course does not itself address memory synchronization
between cores/cpus, but that aspect was already handled. this all
seems less than ideal, but it's the best we can do without mandating a
C11 compiler and using the C11 model for atomics.
in the case of pthread_once_t, the ABI type of the underlying object
is not volatile-qualified. so we are assuming that accessing the
object through a volatile-qualified lvalue via casts yields volatile
access semantics. the language of the C standard is somewhat unclear
on this matter, but this is an assumption the linux kernel also makes,
and seems to be the correct interpretation of the standard.
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the previous spin limit of 10000 was utterly unreasonable.
empirically, it could consume up to 200000 cycles, whereas a failed
futex wait (EAGAIN) typically takes 1000 cycles or less, and even a
true wait/wake round seems much less expensive.
the new counts (100 for general wait, 200 in barrier) were simply
chosen to be in the range of what's reasonable without having adverse
effects on casual micro-benchmark tests I have been running. they may
still be too high, from a standpoint of not wasting cpu cycles, but at
least they're a lot better than before. rigorous testing across
different archs and cpu models should be performed at some point to
determine whether further adjustments should be made.
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for unknown syscall commands, the kernel produces ENOSYS, not EINVAL.
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private-futex uses the virtual address of the futex int directly as
the hash key rather than requiring the kernel to resolve the address
to an underlying backing for the mapping in which it lies. for certain
usage patterns it improves performance significantly.
in many places, the code using futex __wake and __wait operations was
already passing a correct fixed zero or nonzero flag for the priv
argument, so no change was needed at the site of the call, only in the
__wake and __wait functions themselves. in other places, especially
where the process-shared attribute for a synchronization object was
not previously tracked, additional new code is needed. for mutexes,
the only place to store the flag is in the type field, so additional
bit masking logic is needed for accessing the type.
for non-process-shared condition variable broadcasts, the futex
requeue operation is unable to requeue from a private futex to a
process-shared one in the mutex structure, so requeue is simply
disabled in this case by waking all waiters.
for robust mutexes, the kernel always performs a non-private wake when
the owner dies. in order not to introduce a behavioral regression in
non-process-shared robust mutexes (when the owning thread dies), they
are simply forced to be treated as process-shared for now, giving
correct behavior at the expense of performance. this can be fixed by
adding explicit code to pthread_exit to do the right thing for
non-shared robust mutexes in userspace rather than relying on the
kernel to do it, and will be fixed in this way later.
since not all supported kernels have private futex support, the new
code detects EINVAL from the futex syscall and falls back to making
the call without the private flag. no attempt to cache the result is
made; caching it and using the cached value efficiently is somewhat
difficult, and not worth the complexity when the benefits would be
seen only on ancient kernels which have numerous other limitations and
bugs anyway.
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if new shared mappings of files/devices/shared memory can be made
between the time a robust mutex is unlocked and its subsequent removal
from the pending slot in the robustlist header, the kernel can
inadvertently corrupt data in the newly-mapped pages when the process
terminates. i am fixing the bug by using the same global vm lock
mechanism that was used to fix the race condition with unmapping
barriers after pthread_barrier_wait returns.
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there is no need to send a wake when the lock count does not hit zero,
but when it does, all waiters must be woken (since all with the same
sign are eligible to obtain the lock).
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eliminate the sequence number field and instead use the counter as the
futex because of the way the lock is held, sequence numbers are
completely useless, and this frees up a field in the barrier structure
to be used as a waiter count for the count futex, which lets us avoid
some syscalls in the best case.
as of now, self-synchronized destruction and unmapping should be fully
safe. before any thread can return from the barrier, all threads in
the barrier have obtained the vm lock, and each holds a shared lock on
the barrier. the barrier memory is not inspected after the shared lock
count reaches 0, nor after the vm lock is released.
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i think this works, but it can be simplified. (next step)
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i set the return value but then never used it... oops!
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this implementation is rather heavy-weight, but it's the first
solution i've found that's actually correct. all waiters actually wait
twice at the barrier so that they can synchronize exit, and they hold
a "vm lock" that prevents changes to virtual memory mappings (and
blocks pthread_barrier_destroy) until all waiters are finished
inspecting the barrier.
thus, it is safe for any thread to destroy and/or unmap the barrier's
memory as soon as pthread_barrier_wait returns, without further
synchronization.
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the previous implementation had at least 2 problems:
1. the case where additional threads reached the barrier before the
first wave was finished leaving the barrier was untested and seemed
not to be working.
2. threads leaving the barrier continued to access memory within the
barrier object after other threads had successfully returned from
pthread_barrier_wait. this could lead to memory corruption or crashes
if the barrier object had automatic storage in one of the waiting
threads and went out of scope before all threads finished returning,
or if one thread unmapped the memory in which the barrier object
lived.
the new implementation avoids both problems by making the barrier
state essentially local to the first thread which enters the barrier
wait, and forces that thread to be the last to return.
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this allows sys/types.h to provide the pthread types, as required by
POSIX. this design also facilitates forcing ABI-compatible sizes in
the arch-specific alltypes.h, while eliminating the need for
developers changing the internals of the pthread types to poke around
with arch-specific headers they may not be able to test.
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