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.
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.
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.
the changes to syscall_ret are mostly no-ops in the generated code,
just cleanup of type issues and removal of some implementation-defined
behavior. the one exception is the change in the comparison value,
which is fixed so that 0xf...f000 (which in principle could be a valid
return value for mmap, although probably never in reality) is not
treated as an error return.
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.
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.
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.
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.
if the file descriptor resource limit has been increased past
FD_SETSIZE, this is actually a security issue; we could write past the
end of the fd_set object. using poll makes it a non-issue, and
simplifies the code at the same time.
also, use clock_gettime instead of gettimeofday, for reduced bloat
and better entropy.
for now this is just a tiny optimization, but later if we support
cancellation from __stdio_read and __stdio_write, it will be necessary
for the recusrive lock count to be zero in order for these functions
to know they are responsible for unlocking the FILE on cancellation.
the arm syscall abi requires 64-bit arguments to be aligned on an even
register boundary. these new macros facilitate meeting the abi
requirement without imposing significant ugliness on the code.
this port assumes eabi calling conventions, eabi linux syscall
convention, and presence of the kernel helpers at 0xffff0f?0 needed
for threads support. otherwise it makes very few assumptions, and the
code should work even on armv4 without thumb support, as well as on
systems with thumb interworking. the bits headers declare this a
little endian system, but as far as i can tell the code should work
equally well on big endian.
some small details are probably broken; so far, testing has been
limited to qemu/aboriginal linux.
several things are changed. first, i have removed the old __uniclone
function signature and replaced it with the "standard" linux
__clone/clone signature. this was necessary to expose clone to
applications anyway, and it makes it easier to port __clone to new
archs, since it's now testable independently of pthread_create.
secondly, i have removed all references to the ugly ldt descriptor
structure (i386 only) from the c code and pthread structure. in places
where it is needed, it is now created on the stack just when it's
needed, in assembly code. thus, the i386 __clone function takes the
desired thread pointer as its argument, rather than an ldt descriptor
pointer, just like on all other sane archs. this should not affect
applications since there is really no way an application can use clone
with threads/tls in a way that doesn't horribly conflict with and
clobber the underlying implementation's use. applications are expected
to use clone only for creating actual processes, possibly with new
namespace features and whatnot.
eventually we may have a working "generic" implementation for archs
that don't need anything special. in any case, the goal of having
stubs like this is to allow early testing of new ports before all the
details needed for threads have been filled in. more functions like
this will follow.
programs that use this tend to horribly botch international text
support, so it's questionable whether we want to support it even in
the long term... for now, it's just a dummy that calls strcmp.
on spurious wakeups/returns from __timedwait, pthread_join would
"succeed" and unmap the thread's stack while it was still running. at
best this would lead to SIGSEGV when the thread resumed execution, but
in the worst case, the thread would later resume executing on top of
another new thread's stack mapped at the same address.
spent about 4 hours tracking this bug down, chasing rare
difficult-to-reproduce stack corruption in a stress test program.
still no idea *what* caused the spurious wakeups; i suspect it's a
kernel bug.
this seeme to be the bug that prevented enabling of private futex
support. i'm going to hold off on switching to private futexes until
after the next release, and until i get a chance to audit all
wait/wake calls to make sure they're using the correct private
argument, but with this change it should be safe to enable private
futex support.
null termination is only added when current size grows.
in update modes, null termination is not added if it does not fit
(i.e. it is not allowed to clobber data).
these rules make very little sense, but that's how it goes..
read should not be allowed past "current size".
append mode should write at "current size", not buffer size.
null termination should not be written except when "current size" grows.
this is not strictly required by the standard, but without it, there
is a race condition where cancellation arriving just before async
cancellation is enabled might not be acted upon. it is impossible for
a conforming application to work around this race condition since
calling pthread_testcancel after setting async cancellation mode is
not allowed (pthread_testcancel is not specified to be
async-cancel-safe). thus the implementation should be responsible for
eliminating the race, from a quality-of-implementation standpoint.
Rich Felker