1 Started by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>
6 what are robust futexes? To answer that, we first need to understand
7 what futexes are: normal futexes are special types of locks that in the
8 noncontended case can be acquired/released from userspace without having
11 A futex is in essence a user-space address, e.g. a 32-bit lock variable
12 field. If userspace notices contention (the lock is already owned and
13 someone else wants to grab it too) then the lock is marked with a value
14 that says "there's a waiter pending", and the sys_futex(FUTEX_WAIT)
15 syscall is used to wait for the other guy to release it. The kernel
16 creates a 'futex queue' internally, so that it can later on match up the
17 waiter with the waker - without them having to know about each other.
18 When the owner thread releases the futex, it notices (via the variable
19 value) that there were waiter(s) pending, and does the
20 sys_futex(FUTEX_WAKE) syscall to wake them up. Once all waiters have
21 taken and released the lock, the futex is again back to 'uncontended'
22 state, and there's no in-kernel state associated with it. The kernel
23 completely forgets that there ever was a futex at that address. This
24 method makes futexes very lightweight and scalable.
26 "Robustness" is about dealing with crashes while holding a lock: if a
27 process exits prematurely while holding a pthread_mutex_t lock that is
28 also shared with some other process (e.g. yum segfaults while holding a
29 pthread_mutex_t, or yum is kill -9-ed), then waiters for that lock need
30 to be notified that the last owner of the lock exited in some irregular
33 To solve such types of problems, "robust mutex" userspace APIs were
34 created: pthread_mutex_lock() returns an error value if the owner exits
35 prematurely - and the new owner can decide whether the data protected by
36 the lock can be recovered safely.
38 There is a big conceptual problem with futex based mutexes though: it is
39 the kernel that destroys the owner task (e.g. due to a SEGFAULT), but
40 the kernel cannot help with the cleanup: if there is no 'futex queue'
41 (and in most cases there is none, futexes being fast lightweight locks)
42 then the kernel has no information to clean up after the held lock!
43 Userspace has no chance to clean up after the lock either - userspace is
44 the one that crashes, so it has no opportunity to clean up. Catch-22.
46 In practice, when e.g. yum is kill -9-ed (or segfaults), a system reboot
47 is needed to release that futex based lock. This is one of the leading
48 bugreports against yum.
50 To solve this problem, the traditional approach was to extend the vma
51 (virtual memory area descriptor) concept to have a notion of 'pending
52 robust futexes attached to this area'. This approach requires 3 new
53 syscall variants to sys_futex(): FUTEX_REGISTER, FUTEX_DEREGISTER and
54 FUTEX_RECOVER. At do_exit() time, all vmas are searched to see whether
55 they have a robust_head set. This approach has two fundamental problems
58 - it has quite complex locking and race scenarios. The vma-based
59 approach had been pending for years, but they are still not completely
62 - they have to scan _every_ vma at sys_exit() time, per thread!
64 The second disadvantage is a real killer: pthread_exit() takes around 1
65 microsecond on Linux, but with thousands (or tens of thousands) of vmas
66 every pthread_exit() takes a millisecond or more, also totally
67 destroying the CPU's L1 and L2 caches!
69 This is very much noticeable even for normal process sys_exit_group()
70 calls: the kernel has to do the vma scanning unconditionally! (this is
71 because the kernel has no knowledge about how many robust futexes there
72 are to be cleaned up, because a robust futex might have been registered
73 in another task, and the futex variable might have been simply mmap()-ed
74 into this process's address space).
76 This huge overhead forced the creation of CONFIG_FUTEX_ROBUST so that
77 normal kernels can turn it off, but worse than that: the overhead makes
78 robust futexes impractical for any type of generic Linux distribution.
80 So something had to be done.
82 New approach to robust futexes
83 ------------------------------
85 At the heart of this new approach there is a per-thread private list of
86 robust locks that userspace is holding (maintained by glibc) - which
87 userspace list is registered with the kernel via a new syscall [this
88 registration happens at most once per thread lifetime]. At do_exit()
89 time, the kernel checks this user-space list: are there any robust futex
90 locks to be cleaned up?
92 In the common case, at do_exit() time, there is no list registered, so
93 the cost of robust futexes is just a simple current->robust_list != NULL
94 comparison. If the thread has registered a list, then normally the list
95 is empty. If the thread/process crashed or terminated in some incorrect
96 way then the list might be non-empty: in this case the kernel carefully
97 walks the list [not trusting it], and marks all locks that are owned by
98 this thread with the FUTEX_OWNER_DIED bit, and wakes up one waiter (if
101 The list is guaranteed to be private and per-thread at do_exit() time,
102 so it can be accessed by the kernel in a lockless way.
104 There is one race possible though: since adding to and removing from the
105 list is done after the futex is acquired by glibc, there is a few
106 instructions window for the thread (or process) to die there, leaving
107 the futex hung. To protect against this possibility, userspace (glibc)
108 also maintains a simple per-thread 'list_op_pending' field, to allow the
109 kernel to clean up if the thread dies after acquiring the lock, but just
110 before it could have added itself to the list. Glibc sets this
111 list_op_pending field before it tries to acquire the futex, and clears
112 it after the list-add (or list-remove) has finished.
114 That's all that is needed - all the rest of robust-futex cleanup is done
115 in userspace [just like with the previous patches].
117 Ulrich Drepper has implemented the necessary glibc support for this new
118 mechanism, which fully enables robust mutexes.
120 Key differences of this userspace-list based approach, compared to the
123 - it's much, much faster: at thread exit time, there's no need to loop
124 over every vma (!), which the VM-based method has to do. Only a very
125 simple 'is the list empty' op is done.
127 - no VM changes are needed - 'struct address_space' is left alone.
129 - no registration of individual locks is needed: robust mutexes dont
130 need any extra per-lock syscalls. Robust mutexes thus become a very
131 lightweight primitive - so they dont force the application designer
132 to do a hard choice between performance and robustness - robust
133 mutexes are just as fast.
135 - no per-lock kernel allocation happens.
137 - no resource limits are needed.
139 - no kernel-space recovery call (FUTEX_RECOVER) is needed.
141 - the implementation and the locking is "obvious", and there are no
142 interactions with the VM.
147 I have benchmarked the time needed for the kernel to process a list of 1
148 million (!) held locks, using the new method [on a 2GHz CPU]:
150 - with FUTEX_WAIT set [contended mutex]: 130 msecs
151 - without FUTEX_WAIT set [uncontended mutex]: 30 msecs
153 I have also measured an approach where glibc does the lock notification
154 [which it currently does for !pshared robust mutexes], and that took 256
155 msecs - clearly slower, due to the 1 million FUTEX_WAKE syscalls
158 (1 million held locks are unheard of - we expect at most a handful of
159 locks to be held at a time. Nevertheless it's nice to know that this
160 approach scales nicely.)
162 Implementation details
163 ----------------------
165 The patch adds two new syscalls: one to register the userspace list, and
166 one to query the registered list pointer:
169 sys_set_robust_list(struct robust_list_head __user *head,
173 sys_get_robust_list(int pid, struct robust_list_head __user **head_ptr,
174 size_t __user *len_ptr);
176 List registration is very fast: the pointer is simply stored in
177 current->robust_list. [Note that in the future, if robust futexes become
178 widespread, we could extend sys_clone() to register a robust-list head
179 for new threads, without the need of another syscall.]
181 So there is virtually zero overhead for tasks not using robust futexes,
182 and even for robust futex users, there is only one extra syscall per
183 thread lifetime, and the cleanup operation, if it happens, is fast and
184 straightforward. The kernel doesn't have any internal distinction between
185 robust and normal futexes.
187 If a futex is found to be held at exit time, the kernel sets the
188 following bit of the futex word:
190 #define FUTEX_OWNER_DIED 0x40000000
192 and wakes up the next futex waiter (if any). User-space does the rest of
195 Otherwise, robust futexes are acquired by glibc by putting the TID into
196 the futex field atomically. Waiters set the FUTEX_WAITERS bit:
198 #define FUTEX_WAITERS 0x80000000
200 and the remaining bits are for the TID.
202 Testing, architecture support
203 -----------------------------
205 i've tested the new syscalls on x86 and x86_64, and have made sure the
206 parsing of the userspace list is robust [ ;-) ] even if the list is
207 deliberately corrupted.
209 i386 and x86_64 syscalls are wired up at the moment, and Ulrich has
210 tested the new glibc code (on x86_64 and i386), and it works for his
211 robust-mutex testcases.
213 All other architectures should build just fine too - but they wont have
214 the new syscalls yet.
216 Architectures need to implement the new futex_atomic_cmpxchg_inatomic()
217 inline function before writing up the syscalls (that function returns
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