Re: [PATCH v4 00/15] Add futex2 syscalls

Nicholas Piggin
2021-06-06T11:59:12Z

Excerpts from Andrey Semashev's message of June 5, 2021 6:56 pm:
> On 6/5/21 4:09 AM, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
>> Excerpts from André Almeida's message of June 5, 2021 6:01 am:
>>> Às 08:36 de 04/06/21, Nicholas Piggin escreveu:
>>
>>>> I'll be burned at the stake for suggesting it but it would be great if
>>>> we could use file descriptors. At least for the shared futex, maybe
>>>> private could use a per-process futex allocator. It solves all of the
>>>> above, although I'm sure has many of its own problem. It may not play
>>>> so nicely with the pthread mutex API because of the whole static
>>>> initialiser problem, but the first futex proposal did use fds. But it's
>>>> an example of an alternate API.
>>>>
>>>
>>> FDs and futex doesn't play well, because for futex_wait() you need to
>>> tell the kernel the expected value in the futex address to avoid
>>> sleeping in a free lock. FD operations (poll, select) don't have this
>>> `value` argument, so they could sleep forever, but I'm not sure if you
>>> had taken this in consideration.
>>
>> I had. The futex wait API would take a fd additional. The only
>> difference is the waitqueue that is used when a sleep or wake is
>> required is derived from the fd, not from an address.
>>
>> I think the bigger sticking points would be if it's too heavyweight an
>> object to use (which could be somewhat mitigated with a simpler ida
>> allocator although that's difficult to do with shared), and whether libc
>> could sanely use them due to the static initialiser problem of pthread
>> mutexes.
>
> The static initialization feature is not the only benefit of the current
> futex design, and probably not the most important one. You can work
> around the static initialization in userspace, e.g. by initializing fd
> to an invalid value and creating a valid fd upon the first use. Although
> that would still incur a performance penalty and add a new source of
> failure.

Sounds like a serious problem, but maybe it isn't. On the other hand,
maybe we don't have to support pthread mutexes as they are anyway
because futex already does that fairly well.

> What is more important is that waiting on fd always requires a kernel
> call. This will be terrible for performance of uncontended locks, which
> is the majority of time.

No. As I said just before, it would be the same except the waitqueue is
derived from fd rather than address.

>
> Another important point is that a futex that is not being waited on
> consumes zero kernel resources while fd is a limited resource even when
> not used. You can have millions futexes in userspace and you are
> guaranteed not to exhaust any limit as long as you have memory. That is
> an important feature, and the current userspace is relying on it by
> assuming that creating mutexes and condition variables is cheap.

Is it an important feture? Would 1 byte of kernel memory per uncontended
futex be okay? 10? 100?

I do see it's very nice the current design that requires no
initialization for uncontended, I'm just asking questions to get an idea
of what constraints we're working with. We have a pretty good API
already which can support unlimited uncontended futexes, so I'm
wondering do we really need another very very similar API that doesn't
fix the really difficult problems of the existing one?

Thanks,
Nick

> Having futex fd would be useful in some cases to be able to integrate
> futexes with IO. I did have use cases where I would have liked to have
> FUTEX_FD in the past. These cases arise when you already have a thread
> that operates on fds and you want to avoid having a separate thread that
> blocks on futexes in a similar fashion. But, IMO, that should be an
> optional opt-in feature. By far, not every futex needs to have an fd.
> For just waiting on multiple futexes, the native support that futex2
> provides is superior.
>
> PS: I'm not asking FUTEX_FD to be implemented as part of futex2 API.
> futex2 would be great even without it.