New libc malloc patch
Jason Evans
jasone at canonware.com
Sun Dec 11 22:32:12 PST 2005
On Dec 11, 2005, at 9:58 PM, Daniel Eischen wrote:
> On Sun, 11 Dec 2005, Jason Evans wrote:
>> I have been contemplating creating a separate spinlock API that
>> doesn't require the threads library to track the spinlocks across
>> fork. This would (if I understand correctly) remove the current
>> static spinlock limitations.
>
> What about using pthread_atfork()?
Aren't there potential ordering issues for that? It seems to me that
the malloc pre-fork code would need to be run after any other pre-
fork functions, in order to avoid potential deadlock, and that the
malloc post-fork code would need to be run before any other post-fork
functions, again to avoid potential deadlock.
After looking at the spinlock code some more, it's no longer clear to
me why the thread/thr_spinlock.c code uses a static array for
spinlocks. It seems to me that it would work fine to allow the
program to provide space for a spinlock and manually initialize it.
This would remove the limitation on the number of spinlocks.
>> As for supporting recursive spinlocks, I doubt that the overhead
>> would be acceptable in general. If I could get rid of the need for
>> the one recursive lock in malloc.c, I certainly would. =)
>
> Why do we need a recursive mutex? Can you not restructure the
> code so that it is not needed?
There is an internal arena that the malloc code uses for allocating
internal data structures. In some cases, the internal arena has to
recursively allocate. If there were no object caching, it might be
possible to pre-allocate, such that recursion never happens, but
given the object caching, it's difficult to reason about precisely
what will occur internally for a single malloc/free operation. There
are some other possibilities, but nothing I've thought of so far is
simple or elegant.
Fixing this would make all locking in the malloc code a bit cheaper,
which is why it continues to bother me.
Jason
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