these functions need to be fast when the init routine has already run, since they may be called very often from code which depends on global initialization having taken place. as such, a fast path bypassing atomic cas on the once control object was used to avoid heavy memory contention. however, on archs with weakly ordered memory, the fast path failed to ensure that the caller actually observes the side effects of the init routine. preliminary performance testing showed that simply removing the fast path was not practical; a performance drop of roughly 85x was observed with 20 threads hammering the same once control on a 24-core machine. so the new explicit barrier operation from atomic.h is used to retain the fast path while ensuring memory visibility. performance may be reduced on some archs where the barrier actually makes a difference, but the previous behavior was unsafe and incorrect on these archs. future improvements to the implementation of a_barrier should reduce the impact.
based on patch by Jens Gustedt. the main difficulty here is handling the difference between start function signatures and thread return types for C11 threads versus POSIX threads. pointers to void are assumed to be able to represent faithfully all values of int. the function pointer for the thread start function is cast to an incorrect type for passing through pthread_create, but is cast back to its correct type before calling so that the behavior of the call is well-defined. changes to the existing threads implementation were kept minimal to reduce the risk of regressions, and duplication of code that carries implementation-specific assumptions was avoided for ease and safety of future maintenance.
Because of the clear separation for private pthread_cond_t these interfaces are quite simple and direct.
These all have POSIX equivalents, but aside from tss_get, they all have minor changes to the signature or return value and thus need to exist as separate functions.
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.
per POSIX these functions are both cancellation points, so they must act on any cancellation request which is pending prior to the call. previously, only the code path where actual waiting took place could act on cancellation.
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.