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path: root/src/thread/pthread_cond_broadcast.c
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2014-08-17redesign cond var implementation to fix multiple issuesRich Felker1-35/+4
the immediate issue that was reported by Jens Gustedt and needed to be fixed was corruption of the cv/mutex waiter states when switching to using a new mutex with the cv after all waiters were unblocked but before they finished returning from the wait function. self-synchronized destruction was also handled poorly and may have had race conditions. and the use of sequence numbers for waking waiters admitted a theoretical missed-wakeup if the sequence number wrapped through the full 32-bit space. the new implementation is largely documented in the comments in the source. the basic principle is to use linked lists initially attached to the cv object, but detachable on signal/broadcast, made up of nodes residing in automatic storage (stack) on the threads that are waiting. this eliminates the need for waiters to access the cv object after they are signaled, and allows us to limit wakeup to one waiter at a time during broadcasts even when futex requeue cannot be used. performance is also greatly improved, roughly double some tests. basically nothing is changed in the process-shared cond var case, where this implementation does not work, since processes do not have access to one another's local storage.
2014-08-15make futex operations use private-futex mode when possibleRich Felker1-3/+7
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.
2014-06-10replace all remaining internal uses of pthread_self with __pthread_selfRich Felker1-1/+1
prior to version 1.1.0, the difference between pthread_self (the public function) and __pthread_self (the internal macro or inline function) was that the former would lazily initialize the thread pointer if it was not already initialized, whereas the latter would crash in this case. since lazy initialization is no longer supported, use of pthread_self no longer makes sense; it simply generates larger, slower code.
2011-09-26another cond var fix: requeue count race conditionRich Felker1-6/+2
lock out new waiters during the broadcast. otherwise the wait count added to the mutex might be lower than the actual number of waiters moved, and wakeups may be lost. this issue could also be solved by temporarily setting the mutex waiter count higher than any possible real count, then relying on the kernel to tell us how many waiters were requeued, and updating the counts afterwards. however the logic is more complex, and i don't really trust the kernel. the solution here is also nice in that it replaces some atomic cas loops with simple non-atomic ops under lock.
2011-09-26fix lost signals in cond varsRich Felker1-2/+6
due to moving waiters from the cond var to the mutex in bcast, these waiters upon wakeup would steal slots in the count from newer waiters that had not yet been signaled, preventing the signal function from taking any action. to solve the problem, we simply use two separate waiter counts, and so that the original "total" waiters count is undisturbed by broadcast and still available for signal.
2011-09-26redo cond vars again, use sequence numbersRich Felker1-27/+18
testing revealed that the old implementation, while correct, was giving way too many spurious wakeups due to races changing the value of the condition futex. in a test program with 5 threads receiving broadcast signals, the number of returns from pthread_cond_wait was roughly 3 times what it should have been (2 spurious wakeups for every legitimate wakeup). moreover, the magnitude of this effect seems to grow with the number of threads. the old implementation may also have had some nasty race conditions with reuse of the cond var with a new mutex. the new implementation is based on incrementing a sequence number with each signal event. this sequence number has nothing to do with the number of threads intended to be woken; it's only used to provide a value for the futex wait to avoid deadlock. in theory there is a danger of race conditions due to the value wrapping around after 2^32 signals. it would be nice to eliminate that, if there's a way. testing showed no spurious wakeups (though they are of course possible) with the new implementation, as well as slightly improved performance.
2011-09-25revert previous change in cond var waiter moveRich Felker1-2/+6
using swap has a race condition: the waiters must be added to the mutex waiter count *before* they are taken off the cond var waiter count, or wake events can be lost.
2011-09-25optimize cond waiter move using atomic swap instead of cas loopRich Felker1-6/+2
2011-09-25fix logic for when wakeup is not desired on cond bcastRich Felker1-3/+4
somehow i forgot that normal-type mutexes don't store the owner tid.
2011-09-25new futex-requeue-based pthread_cond_broadcast implementationRich Felker1-1/+40
this avoids the "stampede effect" where pthread_cond_broadcast would result in all waiters waking up simultaneously, only to immediately contend for the mutex and go back to sleep.
2011-09-23fix ABA race in cond vars, improve them overallRich Felker1-3/+2
previously, a waiter could miss the 1->0 transition of block if another thread set block to 1 again after the signal function set block to 0. we now use the caller's thread id as a unique token to store in block, which no other thread will ever write there. this ensures that if block still contains the tid, no signal has occurred. spurious wakeups will of course occur whenever there is a spurious return from the futex wait and another thread has begun waiting on the cond var. this should be a rare occurrence except perhaps in the presence of interrupting signal handlers. signal/bcast operations have been improved by noting that they need not avoid inspecting the cond var's memory after changing the futex value. because the standard allows spurious wakeups, there is no way for an application to distinguish between a spurious wakeup just before another thread called signal/bcast, and the deliberate wakeup resulting from the signal/bcast call. thus the woken thread must assume that the signalling thread may still be waiting to act on the cond var, and therefore it cannot destroy/unmap the cond var.
2011-09-22fix deadlock in condition wait whenever there are multiple waitersRich Felker1-1/+2
it's amazing none of the conformance tests i've run even bothered to check whether something so basic works...
2011-08-07condition variable signal/bcast need not wake unless there are waitersRich Felker1-2/+2
2011-02-17reorganize pthread data structures and move the definitions to alltypes.hRich Felker1-2/+2
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.
2011-02-12initial check-in, version 0.5.0v0.5.0Rich Felker1-0/+8