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Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2014 09:59:07 -0500
From: Rich Felker <dalias@...ifal.cx>
To: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: What does this code do?
On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 03:35:43PM +0100, Jens Eichendorff wrote:
> While skimming some parts of the musl libc I have come across the
> following weird line in `src/thread/__wait.c':
>
> if (priv) priv = 128; priv=0;
>
> whereby `priv' is then bitwise OR-ed to the FUTEX_WAIT operation
> constant to a futex syscall. Does this code exist to avoid
> optimizations, do optimizations, or just add waiting time? What does it
> do and what is the `priv' parameter of __wait() for? Excuse me if this
> is a really stupid question, I'm not very familiar with somewhat
> low-level code.
>
> Looking through the git logs this is part of the initial import commit,
> so I could not find any comments to why this was done.
It's not a stupid question at all. This is simply a silly way of
disabling support for private-futex mode, which is not presently
working. Private futex mode is a feature added to the kernel somewhere
during the mid 2.6 series (if I recall right) that only works for
futexes within a single process, not shared between processes, by
using the virtual address directly as the futex key rather than keying
the futex by the underlying backing for the mapping. It allows for a
much faster path in kernel-space (avoids taking a global lock and
possibly sleeping) and possibly also eliminates some ugly failure
cases (which in principle should not exist, but the kernel is broken
like that...).
Unfortunately, since we want to support both old and new kernels
(where old kernels lack it), we need a way to fallback to not using
private futex mode if it's not supported. Also, the synchronization
object needs to accurately reflect whether the application requested
it be process-shared, so that we can avoid using private futex mode
when it's not valid to do so. Making the fallback reasonably efficient
is not easy; we want to cache the result, but storing it globally
would incur synchronization cost and GOT access cost on each futex
operation (potentially expensive in bloat as well as time) while
storing it in TLS would incur thread-pointer access time (very slow on
some archs) for each operation and have the risk of threads
mismatching each other's choices due to spurious failures by the
kernel (not sure if these exist or not) that could lead to deadlocks.
So adding support, while it's been an agenda item for a long time,
requires nontrivial work/research on how to do it right (note: I'm not
convinced glibc does it right).
Hope this answers your question!
Rich
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