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commit f08ab9e61a147630497198fe3239149275c0a3f4 introduced these
accidentally as remnants of some work I tried that did not work out.
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this global lock allows certain unlock-type primitives to exclude
mmap/munmap operations which could change the identity of virtual
addresses while references to them still exist.
the original design mistakenly assumed mmap/munmap would conversely
need to exclude the same operations which exclude mmap/munmap, so the
vmlock was implemented as a sort of 'symmetric recursive rwlock'. this
turned out to be unnecessary.
commit 25d12fc0fc51f1fae0f85b4649a6463eb805aa8f already shortened the
interval during which mmap/munmap held their side of the lock, but
left the inappropriate lock design and some inefficiency.
the new design uses a separate function, __vm_wait, which does not
hold any lock itself and only waits for lock users which were already
present when it was called to release the lock. this is sufficient
because of the way operations that need to be excluded are sequenced:
the "unlock-type" operations using the vmlock need only block
mmap/munmap operations that are precipitated by (and thus sequenced
after) the atomic-unlock they perform while holding the vmlock.
this allows for a spectacular lack of synchronization in the __vm_wait
function itself.
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the memory model we use internally for atomics permits plain loads of
values which may be subject to concurrent modification without
requiring that a special load function be used. since a compiler is
free to make transformations that alter the number of loads or the way
in which loads are performed, the compiler is theoretically free to
break this usage. the most obvious concern is with atomic cas
constructs: something of the form tmp=*p;a_cas(p,tmp,f(tmp)); could be
transformed to a_cas(p,*p,f(*p)); where the latter is intended to show
multiple loads of *p whose resulting values might fail to be equal;
this would break the atomicity of the whole operation. but even more
fundamental breakage is possible.
with the changes being made now, objects that may be modified by
atomics are modeled as volatile, and the atomic operations performed
on them by other threads are modeled as asynchronous stores by
hardware which happens to be acting on the request of another thread.
such modeling of course does not itself address memory synchronization
between cores/cpus, but that aspect was already handled. this all
seems less than ideal, but it's the best we can do without mandating a
C11 compiler and using the C11 model for atomics.
in the case of pthread_once_t, the ABI type of the underlying object
is not volatile-qualified. so we are assuming that accessing the
object through a volatile-qualified lvalue via casts yields volatile
access semantics. the language of the C standard is somewhat unclear
on this matter, but this is an assumption the linux kernel also makes,
and seems to be the correct interpretation of the standard.
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if new shared mappings of files/devices/shared memory can be made
between the time a robust mutex is unlocked and its subsequent removal
from the pending slot in the robustlist header, the kernel can
inadvertently corrupt data in the newly-mapped pages when the process
terminates. i am fixing the bug by using the same global vm lock
mechanism that was used to fix the race condition with unmapping
barriers after pthread_barrier_wait returns.
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