I had the pleasure of spending a significant amount of time at the most
recent LPC with Mathieu Desnoyers and Paul McKenney. In discussing
RCU semantics in relation to epoch reclamation, it was argued that
epoch reclamation is a specialisation of RCU (rather than a generalization).
In light of this discussion, I thought it would make more sense to not expose
write-side synchronization semantics aside from ck_epoch_call (similar to
RCU call), ck_epoch_poll (identical to tick), ck_epoch_barrier and
ck_epoch_synchronization (similar to ck_epoch_synchronization). Writers will
now longer have to use write-side epoch sections but can instead rely on
epoch_barrier/synchronization for blocking semantics and ck_epoch_poll
for old tick semantics.
One advantage of this is we can avoid write-side recursion for certain workloads.
Additionally, for infrequent writes, epoch_barrier and epoch_synchronization both
allow for blocking semantics to be used so you don't have to pay the cost of
epoch_entry for non-blocking dispatch.
Example usage:
e = stack_pop(mystack);
ck_epoch_synchronize(...);
free(e);
read_begin and read_end has been replaced with ck_epoch_begin and ck_epoch_end.
If multiple writers need SMR guarantees, then they can also use ck_epoch_begin
and ck_epoch_end. Any dispatch in presence of multiple writers should be done
with-in an epoch section (for now).
There are some follow-up commits to come.
Some people might be confused as far as lack of
fencing in the lock. Add a comment to clarify that
old values should not be equal to new values
of current position (where acquiring the current position
already has a global ordering).
As ck_pr semantics were still not molded, I was designing
under the assumption I would potentially go towards
acq/req interface. Since RMO will be the semantic norm for
the ck_pr model from now on, enforce stricter ordering
requirements on rwlock.
ck_rwlock_write_unlock function will now also serialize both
loads and stores.
I was actually unsure of the exact memory model
I wanted for atomic RMW operations. It was
made apparent with time that I had to adopt RMO
if I didn't want to sacrifice performance. Make
sure we can assume RMO for the stack.
I accidentally swapped head/tail load in ck_hp_fifo (not in
ck_fifo, however). We must acquire head snapshot before tail snapshot.
An example execution history which could cause an incorrect update to occur
is below.
- tail <- fifo.tail / fifo.head != fifo.tail
- dequeue to empty (until final CAS which renders fifo.head = fifo.tail)
- head <- fifo.head / (head != tail)
- next <- fifo.head->next / next = NULL
- As head != tail, update to next pointer (where next is NULL).
However, if
- head <- fifo.head / (fifo.head != fifo.tail)
- dequeue to empty (until final CAS which renders fifo.head = fifo.tail)
- tail <- fifo.tail / fifo.head != fifo.tail
- next <- fifo.head->next / next = NULL
If we caught tail in final transition, the by the time we read next pointer,
head would have also changed forcing us to re-read. Thanks to Hendrik Donner
for reporting this.
Documentation and regressions tests have been updated to reflect this.
This functionality allows for individual hash tables use to different
allocation functions. Thanks to Wez Furlong for pointing out the necessary
documentation update for ck_ht.
Samy Al Bahra
Samy Al Bahra