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path: root/src/thread/sem_post.c
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2014-08-15make futex operations use private-futex mode when possibleRich Felker-2/+2
private-futex uses the virtual address of the futex int directly as the hash key rather than requiring the kernel to resolve the address to an underlying backing for the mapping in which it lies. for certain usage patterns it improves performance significantly. in many places, the code using futex __wake and __wait operations was already passing a correct fixed zero or nonzero flag for the priv argument, so no change was needed at the site of the call, only in the __wake and __wait functions themselves. in other places, especially where the process-shared attribute for a synchronization object was not previously tracked, additional new code is needed. for mutexes, the only place to store the flag is in the type field, so additional bit masking logic is needed for accessing the type. for non-process-shared condition variable broadcasts, the futex requeue operation is unable to requeue from a private futex to a process-shared one in the mutex structure, so requeue is simply disabled in this case by waking all waiters. for robust mutexes, the kernel always performs a non-private wake when the owner dies. in order not to introduce a behavioral regression in non-process-shared robust mutexes (when the owning thread dies), they are simply forced to be treated as process-shared for now, giving correct behavior at the expense of performance. this can be fixed by adding explicit code to pthread_exit to do the right thing for non-shared robust mutexes in userspace rather than relying on the kernel to do it, and will be fixed in this way later. since not all supported kernels have private futex support, the new code detects EINVAL from the futex syscall and falls back to making the call without the private flag. no attempt to cache the result is made; caching it and using the cached value efficiently is somewhat difficult, and not worth the complexity when the benefits would be seen only on ancient kernels which have numerous other limitations and bugs anyway.
2011-10-26report sem value overflows in sem_postRich Felker-0/+4
this is not required by the standard, but it's nicer than corrupting the state and rather inexpensive.
2011-08-02overhaul posix semaphores to fix destructability raceRich Felker-3/+6
the race condition these changes address is described in glibc bug report number 12674: http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12674 up until now, musl has shared the bug, and i had not been able to figure out how to eliminate it. in short, the problem is that it's not valid for sem_post to inspect the waiters count after incrementing the semaphore value, because another thread may have already successfully returned from sem_wait, (rightly) deemed itself the only remaining user of the semaphore, and chosen to destroy and free it (or unmap the shared memory it's stored in). POSIX is not explicit in blessing this usage, but it gives a very explicit analogous example with mutexes (which, in musl and glibc, also suffer from the same race condition bug) in the rationale for pthread_mutex_destroy. the new semaphore implementation augments the waiter count with a redundant waiter indication in the semaphore value itself, representing the presence of "last minute" waiters that may have arrived after sem_post read the waiter count. this allows sem_post to read the waiter count prior to incrementing the semaphore value, rather than after incrementing it, so as to avoid accessing the semaphore memory whatsoever after the increment takes place. a similar, but much simpler, fix should be possible for mutexes and other locking primitives whose usage rules are stricter than semaphores.
2011-04-06major semaphore improvements (performance and correctness)Rich Felker-1/+2
1. make sem_[timed]wait interruptible by signals, per POSIX 2. keep a waiter count in order to avoid unnecessary futex wake syscalls
2011-03-04implement POSIX semaphoresRich Felker-0/+9