Subversion Repositories or1k_soc_on_altera_embedded_dev_kit

Started by: Ingo Molnar 

Background

----------

what are robust futexes? To answer that, we first need to understand

what futexes are: normal futexes are special types of locks that in the

noncontended case can be acquired/released from userspace without having

to enter the kernel.

A futex is in essence a user-space address, e.g. a 32-bit lock variable

field. If userspace notices contention (the lock is already owned and

someone else wants to grab it too) then the lock is marked with a value

that says "there's a waiter pending", and the sys_futex(FUTEX_WAIT)

syscall is used to wait for the other guy to release it. The kernel

creates a 'futex queue' internally, so that it can later on match up the

waiter with the waker - without them having to know about each other.

When the owner thread releases the futex, it notices (via the variable

value) that there were waiter(s) pending, and does the

sys_futex(FUTEX_WAKE) syscall to wake them up.  Once all waiters have

taken and released the lock, the futex is again back to 'uncontended'

state, and there's no in-kernel state associated with it. The kernel

completely forgets that there ever was a futex at that address. This

method makes futexes very lightweight and scalable.

"Robustness" is about dealing with crashes while holding a lock: if a

process exits prematurely while holding a pthread_mutex_t lock that is

also shared with some other process (e.g. yum segfaults while holding a

pthread_mutex_t, or yum is kill -9-ed), then waiters for that lock need

to be notified that the last owner of the lock exited in some irregular

way.

To solve such types of problems, "robust mutex" userspace APIs were

created: pthread_mutex_lock() returns an error value if the owner exits

prematurely - and the new owner can decide whether the data protected by

the lock can be recovered safely.

There is a big conceptual problem with futex based mutexes though: it is

the kernel that destroys the owner task (e.g. due to a SEGFAULT), but

the kernel cannot help with the cleanup: if there is no 'futex queue'

(and in most cases there is none, futexes being fast lightweight locks)

then the kernel has no information to clean up after the held lock!

Userspace has no chance to clean up after the lock either - userspace is

the one that crashes, so it has no opportunity to clean up. Catch-22.

In practice, when e.g. yum is kill -9-ed (or segfaults), a system reboot

is needed to release that futex based lock. This is one of the leading

bugreports against yum.

To solve this problem, the traditional approach was to extend the vma

(virtual memory area descriptor) concept to have a notion of 'pending

robust futexes attached to this area'. This approach requires 3 new

syscall variants to sys_futex(): FUTEX_REGISTER, FUTEX_DEREGISTER and

FUTEX_RECOVER. At do_exit() time, all vmas are searched to see whether

they have a robust_head set. This approach has two fundamental problems

left:

 - it has quite complex locking and race scenarios. The vma-based

   approach had been pending for years, but they are still not completely

   reliable.

 - they have to scan _every_ vma at sys_exit() time, per thread!

The second disadvantage is a real killer: pthread_exit() takes around 1

microsecond on Linux, but with thousands (or tens of thousands) of vmas

every pthread_exit() takes a millisecond or more, also totally

destroying the CPU's L1 and L2 caches!

This is very much noticeable even for normal process sys_exit_group()

calls: the kernel has to do the vma scanning unconditionally! (this is

because the kernel has no knowledge about how many robust futexes there

are to be cleaned up, because a robust futex might have been registered

in another task, and the futex variable might have been simply mmap()-ed

into this process's address space).

This huge overhead forced the creation of CONFIG_FUTEX_ROBUST so that

normal kernels can turn it off, but worse than that: the overhead makes

robust futexes impractical for any type of generic Linux distribution.

So something had to be done.

New approach to robust futexes

------------------------------

At the heart of this new approach there is a per-thread private list of

robust locks that userspace is holding (maintained by glibc) - which

userspace list is registered with the kernel via a new syscall [this

registration happens at most once per thread lifetime]. At do_exit()

time, the kernel checks this user-space list: are there any robust futex

locks to be cleaned up?

In the common case, at do_exit() time, there is no list registered, so

the cost of robust futexes is just a simple current->robust_list != NULL

comparison. If the thread has registered a list, then normally the list

is empty. If the thread/process crashed or terminated in some incorrect

way then the list might be non-empty: in this case the kernel carefully

walks the list [not trusting it], and marks all locks that are owned by

this thread with the FUTEX_OWNER_DIED bit, and wakes up one waiter (if

any).

The list is guaranteed to be private and per-thread at do_exit() time,

so it can be accessed by the kernel in a lockless way.

There is one race possible though: since adding to and removing from the

list is done after the futex is acquired by glibc, there is a few

instructions window for the thread (or process) to die there, leaving

the futex hung. To protect against this possibility, userspace (glibc)

also maintains a simple per-thread 'list_op_pending' field, to allow the

kernel to clean up if the thread dies after acquiring the lock, but just

before it could have added itself to the list. Glibc sets this

list_op_pending field before it tries to acquire the futex, and clears

it after the list-add (or list-remove) has finished.

That's all that is needed - all the rest of robust-futex cleanup is done

in userspace [just like with the previous patches].

Ulrich Drepper has implemented the necessary glibc support for this new

mechanism, which fully enables robust mutexes.

Key differences of this userspace-list based approach, compared to the

vma based method:

 - it's much, much faster: at thread exit time, there's no need to loop

   over every vma (!), which the VM-based method has to do. Only a very

   simple 'is the list empty' op is done.

 - no VM changes are needed - 'struct address_space' is left alone.

 - no registration of individual locks is needed: robust mutexes dont

   need any extra per-lock syscalls. Robust mutexes thus become a very

   lightweight primitive - so they dont force the application designer

   to do a hard choice between performance and robustness - robust

   mutexes are just as fast.

 - no per-lock kernel allocation happens.

 - no resource limits are needed.

 - no kernel-space recovery call (FUTEX_RECOVER) is needed.

 - the implementation and the locking is "obvious", and there are no

   interactions with the VM.

Performance

-----------

I have benchmarked the time needed for the kernel to process a list of 1

million (!) held locks, using the new method [on a 2GHz CPU]:

 - with FUTEX_WAIT set [contended mutex]: 130 msecs

 - without FUTEX_WAIT set [uncontended mutex]: 30 msecs

I have also measured an approach where glibc does the lock notification

[which it currently does for !pshared robust mutexes], and that took 256

msecs - clearly slower, due to the 1 million FUTEX_WAKE syscalls

userspace had to do.

(1 million held locks are unheard of - we expect at most a handful of

locks to be held at a time. Nevertheless it's nice to know that this

approach scales nicely.)

Implementation details

----------------------

The patch adds two new syscalls: one to register the userspace list, and

one to query the registered list pointer:

 asmlinkage long

 sys_set_robust_list(struct robust_list_head __user *head,

                     size_t len);

 asmlinkage long

 sys_get_robust_list(int pid, struct robust_list_head __user **head_ptr,

                     size_t __user *len_ptr);

List registration is very fast: the pointer is simply stored in

current->robust_list. [Note that in the future, if robust futexes become

widespread, we could extend sys_clone() to register a robust-list head

for new threads, without the need of another syscall.]

So there is virtually zero overhead for tasks not using robust futexes,

and even for robust futex users, there is only one extra syscall per

thread lifetime, and the cleanup operation, if it happens, is fast and

straightforward. The kernel doesn't have any internal distinction between

robust and normal futexes.

If a futex is found to be held at exit time, the kernel sets the

following bit of the futex word:

        #define FUTEX_OWNER_DIED        0x40000000

and wakes up the next futex waiter (if any). User-space does the rest of

the cleanup.

Otherwise, robust futexes are acquired by glibc by putting the TID into

the futex field atomically. Waiters set the FUTEX_WAITERS bit:

        #define FUTEX_WAITERS           0x80000000

and the remaining bits are for the TID.

Testing, architecture support

-----------------------------

i've tested the new syscalls on x86 and x86_64, and have made sure the

parsing of the userspace list is robust [ ;-) ] even if the list is

deliberately corrupted.

i386 and x86_64 syscalls are wired up at the moment, and Ulrich has

tested the new glibc code (on x86_64 and i386), and it works for his

robust-mutex testcases.

All other architectures should build just fine too - but they wont have

the new syscalls yet.

Architectures need to implement the new futex_atomic_cmpxchg_inatomic()

inline function before writing up the syscalls (that function returns

-ENOSYS right now).