o Runnable threads are now maintained in priority queues. The
implementation requires two things:
1.) The priority queues must be protected during insertion
and removal of threads. Since the kernel scheduler
must modify the priority queues, a spinlock for
protection cannot be used. The functions
_thread_kern_sched_defer() and _thread_kern_sched_undefer()
were added to {un}defer kernel scheduler activation.
2.) A thread (active) priority change can be performed only
when the thread is removed from the priority queue. The
implementation uses a threads active priority when
inserting it into the queue.
A by-product is that thread switches are much faster. A
separate queue is used for waiting and/or blocked threads,
and it is searched at most 2 times in the kernel scheduler
when there are active threads. It should be possible to
reduce this to once by combining polling of threads waiting
on I/O with the loop that looks for timed out threads and
the minimum timeout value.
o Functions to defer kernel scheduler activation were added. These
are _thread_kern_sched_defer() and _thread_kern_sched_undefer()
and may be called recursively. These routines do not block the
scheduling signal, but latch its occurrence. The signal handler
will not call the kernel scheduler when the running thread has
deferred scheduling, but it will be called when running thread
undefers scheduling.
o Added support for _POSIX_THREAD_PRIORITY_SCHEDULING. All the
POSIX routines required by this should now be implemented.
One note, SCHED_OTHER, SCHED_FIFO, and SCHED_RR are required
to be defined by including pthread.h. These defines are currently
in sched.h. I modified pthread.h to include sched.h but don't
know if this is the proper thing to do.
o Added support for priority protection and inheritence mutexes.
This allows definition of _POSIX_THREAD_PRIO_PROTECT and
_POSIX_THREAD_PRIO_INHERIT.
o Added additional error checks required by POSIX for mutexes and
condition variables.
o Provided a wrapper for sigpending which is marked as a hidden
syscall.
o Added a non-portable function as a debugging aid to allow an
application to monitor thread context switches. An application
can install a routine that gets called everytime a thread
(explicitly created by the application) gets context switched.
The routine gets passed the pthread IDs of the threads that are
being switched in and out.
Submitted by: Dan Eischen <eischen@vigrid.com>
Changes by me:
o Added a PS_SPINBLOCK state to deal with the priority inversion
problem most often (I think) seen by threads calling malloc/free/realloc.
o Dispatch signals to the running thread directly rather than at a
context switch to avoid the situation where the switch never occurs.
the thread kernel into a garbage collector thread which is started when
the fisrt thread is created (other than the initial thread). This
removes the window of opportunity where a context switch will cause a
thread that has locked the malloc spinlock, to enter the thread kernel,
find there is a dead thread and try to free memory, therefore trying
to lock the malloc spinlock against itself.
The garbage collector thread acts just like any other thread, so
instead of having a spinlock to control accesses to the dead thread
list, it uses a mutex and a condition variable so that it can happily
wait to be signalled when a thread exists.
to fork. It is difficult to do real vfork in libc_r, since almost every
operation with file descriptsor changes _thread_fd_table and friends.
popen(3) works much better with this change.
for the process, not a separate set for each thread). By default, the
process now only has signal handlers installed for SIGVTALRM, SIGINFO
and SIGCHLD. The thread kernel signal handler is installed for other
signals on demand. This means that SIG_IGN and SIG_DFL processing is now
left to the kernel, not the thread kernel.
Change the signal dispatch to no longer use a signal thread, and
call the signal handler using the stack of the thread that has the
signal pending.
Change the atomic lock method to use test-and-set asm code with
a yield if blocked. This introduces separate locks for each type
of object instead of blocking signals to prevent a context
switch. It was this blocking of signals that caused the performance
degradation the people have noted.
This is a *big* change!
This will make a number of things easier in the future, as well as (finally!)
avoiding the Id-smashing problem which has plagued developers for so long.
Boy, I'm glad we're not using sup anymore. This update would have been
insane otherwise.
Here are the diffs for libc_r to get it one step closer to P1003.1c
These make most of the thread/mutex/condvar structures opaque to the
user. There are three functions which have been renamed with _np
suffixes because they are extensions to P1003.1c (I did them for JAVA,
which needs to suspend/resume threads and also start threads suspended).
I've created a new header (pthread_np.h) for the non-POSIX stuff.
The egrep tags stuff in /usr/src/lib/libc_r/Makefile that I uncommented
doesn't work. I think its best to delete it. I don't think libc_r needs
tags anyway, 'cause most of the source is in libc which does have tags.
also:
Here's the first batch of man pages for the thread functions.
The diff to /usr/src/lib/libc_r/Makefile removes some stuff that was
inherited from /usr/src/lib/libc/Makefile that should only be done with
libc.
also:
I should have sent this diff with the pthread(3) man page.
It allows people to type
make -DWANT_LIBC_R world
to get libc_r built with the rest of the world. I put this in the
pthread(3) man page. The default is still not to build libc_r.
also:
The diff attached adds a pthread(3) man page to /usr/src/share/man/man3.
The idea is that without libc_r installed, this man page will give people
enough info to know that they have to build libc_r.
It uses a static constructor to call _thread_init() at program start-up
time. That eliminates the need for any initialization hooks in crt0.o.
Added a symbol reference in "uthread_init.c", to ensure that the new
module will always be pulled in when the archive version of the library
is used.
In "Makefile.inc", defined CPLUSPLUSLIB, so that the constructor will be
properly invoked in the shared library.
Suggested by: Christopher Provenzano, Peter Wemm, and others.
