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path: root/src/thread/pthread_cond_signal.c
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2011-09-26redo cond vars again, use sequence numbersRich Felker1-2/+3
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.
2011-09-23fix 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