The intent of this is to avoid name space pollution of the C threads
implementation.
This has two sides to it. First we have to provide symbols that wouldn't
pollute the name space for the C threads implementation. Second we have
to clean up some internal uses of POSIX functions such that they don't
implicitly drag in such symbols.
if there is already a waiter for a lock, spinning on the lock is
essentially an attempt to steal it from whichever waiter would obtain
it via any priority rules in place, and is therefore undesirable. in
the current implementation, there is always an inherent race window at
unlock during which a newly-arriving thread may steal the lock from
the existing waiters, but we should aim to keep this window minimal
rather than enlarging it.
per the resolution of Austin Group issue 755, the POSIX requirement
that ownership be enforced for recursive and error-checking mutexes
does not allow a random new thread to acquire ownership of an orphaned
mutex just because it happened to be assigned the same tid as the
original owner that exited with the mutex locked.
one possible fix for this issue would be to disallow the kernel thread
to terminate when it exited with mutexes held, permanently reserving
the tid against reuse. however, this does not solve the problem for
process-shared mutexes where lifetime cannot be controlled, so it was
not used.
the alternate approach I've taken is to reuse the robust mutex system
for non-robust recursive and error-checking mutexes. when a thread
exits, the kernel (or the new userspace robust-list code added in
commit b092f1c5fa) will set the
owner-died bit for these orphaned mutexes, but since the mutex-type is
not robust, pthread_mutex_trylock will not allow a new owner to
acquire them. instead, they remain in a state of being permanently
locked, as desired.
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.
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.
to deal with the fact that the public headers may be used with pre-c99
compilers, __restrict is used in place of restrict, and defined
appropriately for any supported compiler. we also avoid the form
[restrict] since older versions of gcc rejected it due to a bug in the
original c99 standard, and instead use the form *restrict.
new features:
- FUTEX_WAIT_BITSET op will be used for timed waits if available. this
saves a call to clock_gettime.
- error checking for the timespec struct is now inside __timedwait so
it doesn't need to be duplicated everywhere. cond_timedwait still
needs to duplicate it to avoid unlocking the mutex, though.
- pushing and popping the cancellation handler is delegated to
__timedwait, and cancellable/non-cancellable waits are unified.
this change is needed to fix a race condition and ensure that it's
possible to unlock and destroy or unmap the mutex as soon as
pthread_mutex_lock succeeds. POSIX explicitly gives such an example in
the rationale and requires an implementation to allow such usage.
some of this code should be cleaned up, e.g. using macros for some of
the bit flags, masks, etc. nonetheless, the code is believed to be
working and correct at this point.
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.
