now type sema_t is a structure which can be put in a shared memory area,
and multiple processes can operate it concurrently.
User can either use mmap(MAP_SHARED) + sem_init(pshared=1) or use sem_open()
to initialize a shared semaphore.
Named semaphore uses file system and is located in /tmp directory, and its
file name is prefixed with 'SEMD', so now it is chroot or jail friendly.
In simplist cases, both for named and un-named semaphore, userland code
does not have to enter kernel to reduce/increase semaphore's count.
The semaphore is designed to be crash-safe, it means even if an application
is crashed in the middle of operating semaphore, the semaphore state is
still safely recovered by later use, there is no waiter counter maintained
by userland code.
The main semaphore code is in libc and libthr only has some necessary stubs,
this makes it possible that a non-threaded application can use semaphore
without linking to thread library.
Old semaphore implementation is kept libc to maintain binary compatibility.
The kernel ksem API is no longer used in the new implemenation.
Discussed on: threads@
to make it work, turnstile like mechanism to support priority
propagating and other realtime scheduling options in kernel
should be available to userland mutex, for the moment, I just
want to make libthr be simple and efficient thread library.
Discussed with: deischen, julian
1. fast simple type mutex.
2. __thread tls works.
3. asynchronous cancellation works ( using signal ).
4. thread synchronization is fully based on umtx, mainly, condition
variable and other synchronization objects were rewritten by using
umtx directly. those objects can be shared between processes via
shared memory, it has to change ABI which does not happen yet.
5. default stack size is increased to 1M on 32 bits platform, 2M for
64 bits platform.
As the result, some mysql super-smack benchmarks show performance is
improved massivly.
Okayed by: jeff, mtm, rwatson, scottl
followed are: Only 3 functions (pthread_cancel, pthread_setcancelstate,
pthread_setcanceltype) are required to be async-signal-safe by POSIX. None of
the rest of the pthread api is required to be async-signal-safe. This means
that only the three mentioned functions are safe to use from inside
signal handlers.
However, there are certain system/libc calls that are
cancellation points that a caller may call from within a signal handler,
and since they are cancellation points calls have to be made into libthr
to test for cancellation and exit the thread if necessary. So, the
cancellation test and thread exit code paths must be async-signal-safe
as well. A summary of the changes follows:
o Almost all of the code paths that masked signals, as well as locking the
pthread structure now lock only the pthread structure.
o Signals are masked (and left that way) as soon as a thread enters
pthread_exit().
o The active and dead threads locks now explicitly require that signals
are masked.
o Access to the isdead field of the pthread structure is protected by both
the active and dead list locks for writing. Either one is sufficient for
reading.
o The thread state and type fields have been combined into one three-state
switch to make it easier to read without requiring a lock. It doesn't need
a lock for writing (and therefore for reading either) because only the
current thread can write to it and it is an integer value.
o The thread state field of the pthread structure has been eliminated. It
was an unnecessary field that mostly duplicated the flags field, but
required additional locking that would make a lot more code paths require
signal masking. Any truly unique values (such as PS_DEAD) have been
reborn as separate members of the pthread structure.
o Since the mutex and condvar pthread functions are not async-signal-safe
there is no need to muck about with the wait queues when handling
a signal ...
o ... which also removes the need for wrapping signal handlers and sigaction(2).
o The condvar and mutex async-cancellation code had to be revised as a result
of some of these changes, which resulted in semi-unrelated changes which
would have been difficult to work on as a separate commit, so they are
included as well.
The only part of the changes I am worried about is related to locking for
the pthread joining fields. But, I will take a closer look at them once this
mega-patch is committed.
libthr. No changes were made to libpthread by request of deischen,
who will soon commit a real implementation for that library.
PR: standards/50848
Submitted by: Sergey A. Osokin <osa@freebsd.org.ru>
MFC after: 1 week
