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priority inheritance is a feature to mitigate priority inversion
situations, where a execution of a medium-priority thread can
unboundedly block forward progress of a high-priority thread when a
lock it needs is held by a low-priority thread.
the natural way to do priority inheritance would be with a simple
futex flag to donate the calling thread's priority to a target thread
while it waits on the futex. unfortunately, linux does not offer such
an interface, but instead insists on implementing the whole locking
protocol in kernelspace with special futex commands that exist solely
for the purpose of doing PI mutexes. this would require the entire
"trylock" logic to be duplicated in the timedlock code path for PI
mutexes, since, once the previous lock holder releases the lock and
the futex call returns, the lock is already held by the caller.
obviously such code duplication is undesirable.
instead, I've made the PI timedlock success path set the mutex lock
count to -1, which can be thought of as "not yet complete", since a
lock count of 0 is "locked, with no recursive references". a simple
branch in a non-hot path of pthread_mutex_trylock can then see and act
on this state, skipping past the code that would check and take the
lock to the same code path that runs after the lock is obtained for a
non-PI mutex.
because we're forced to let the kernel perform the actual lock and
unlock operations whenever the mutex is contended, we have to patch
things up when it does the wrong thing:
1. the lock operation is not aware of whether the mutex is
error-checking, so it will always fail with EDEADLK rather than
deadlocking.
2. the lock operation is not aware of whether the mutex is robust, so
it will successfully obtain mutexes in the owner-died state even if
they're non-robust, whereas this operation should deadlock.
3. the unlock operation always sets the lock value to zero, whereas
for robust mutexes, we want to set it to a special value indicating
that the mutex obtained after its owner died was unlocked without
marking it consistent, so that future operations all fail with
ENOTRECOVERABLE.
the first of these is easy to solve, just by performing a futex wait
on a dummy futex address to simulate deadlock or ETIMEDOUT as
appropriate. but problems 2 and 3 interact in a nasty way. to solve
problem 2, we need to back out the spurious success. but if waiters
are present -- which we can't just ignore, because even if we don't
want to wake them, the calling thread is incorrectly inheriting their
priorities -- this requires using the kernel's unlock operation, which
will zero the lock value, thereby losing the "owner died with lock
held" state.
to solve these problems, we overload the mutex's waiters field, which
is unused for PI mutexes since they don't call the normal futex wait
functions, as an indicator that the PI mutex is permanently
non-lockable. originally I wanted to use the count field, but there is
one code path that needs to access this flag without synchronization:
trylock's CAS failure path needs to be able to decide whether to fail
with EBUSY or ENOTRECOVERABLE, the waiters field is already treated as
a relaxed-order atomic in our memory model, so this works out nicely.
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priority inheritance is not yet supported, and priority protection
probably will not be supported ever unless there's serious demand for
it (it's a fairly heavy-weight feature).
per-thread cpu clocks would be nice to have, but to my knowledge linux
is still not capable of supporting them. glibc fakes them by using the
_process_ cpu-time clock and subtracting the thread creation time,
which gives seriously incorrect semantics (worse than not supporting
the feature at all), so until there's a way to do it right, it will
remain as a stub that always fails.
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