svn commit: r252346 - head/share/man/man9
John Baldwin
jhb at FreeBSD.org
Fri Jun 28 16:33:45 UTC 2013
Author: jhb
Date: Fri Jun 28 16:33:45 2013
New Revision: 252346
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/252346
Log:
Make a pass over this page to correct and clarify a few things as well as
some general word-smithing.
- Don't claim that adaptive mutexes have a timeout (they don't).
- Don't treat pool mutexes as a separate primitive in a few places.
- Describe sleepable read-mostly locks as a separate lock type and add
them to the various tables.
- Don't claim that sx locks are less efficient. That hasn't been true in
a few years now.
- Describe lockmanager locks next to sx locks since they are very similar
in terms of rules, etc., and so that all the lock primitives are
grouped together before the non-lock primitives.
- Similarly, move the section on Giant after the description of all the
non-lock primitives to preserve grouping.
- Condition variables work on several types of locks, not just mutexes.
- Add a bit of language to compare/contrast condition variables with
sleep/wakeup.
- Add a note about why pause(9) is unique.
- Add some language to define bounded vs unbounded sleeps and explain
why they are treated separately (bounded sleeps only need CPU time
to make forward progress).
- Don't state that using mtx_sleep() is a bad idea. It is in fact rather
necessary.
- Rework the interaction table a bit. First, it did not include really
include sleepable rmlocks and it left out lockmgr entirely. To get
things to fit, combine similar lock types into the same column / row,
and explicitly state what "sleep" means. The notes about recursion
and lock order were also a bit banal (lock order is always important,
not just in the few places annotated here), so remove them. In
particular, the lock order note would need to be on just about every
cell. If we want to document recursion I think a better approach
would be a separate table summarizing the recursion rules for each
lock as having too many notes clutters the table.
- Tweak the tables to use less indentation so everything still fits with
the added columns.
- Correct a few cells in the context mode table.
- Use mdoc markup instead of explicit markup in a few places.
Requested by: julian
MFC after: 2 weeks
Modified:
head/share/man/man9/locking.9
Modified: head/share/man/man9/locking.9
==============================================================================
--- head/share/man/man9/locking.9 Fri Jun 28 16:24:14 2013 (r252345)
+++ head/share/man/man9/locking.9 Fri Jun 28 16:33:45 2013 (r252346)
@@ -33,53 +33,52 @@
.Sh DESCRIPTION
The
.Em FreeBSD
-kernel is written to run across multiple CPUs and as such requires
-several different synchronization primitives to allow the developers
-to safely access and manipulate the many data types required.
+kernel is written to run across multiple CPUs and as such provides
+several different synchronization primitives to allow developers
+to safely access and manipulate many data types.
.Ss Mutexes
-Mutexes (also erroneously called "sleep mutexes") are the most commonly used
+Mutexes (also called "blocking mutexes") are the most commonly used
synchronization primitive in the kernel.
A thread acquires (locks) a mutex before accessing data shared with other
threads (including interrupt threads), and releases (unlocks) it afterwards.
If the mutex cannot be acquired, the thread requesting it will wait.
-Mutexes are by default adaptive, meaning that
+Mutexes are adaptive by default, meaning that
if the owner of a contended mutex is currently running on another CPU,
-then a thread attempting to acquire the mutex will briefly spin
-in the hope that the owner is only briefly holding it,
-and might release it shortly.
-If the owner does not do so, the waiting thread proceeds to yield the processor,
-allowing other threads to run.
-If the owner is not currently actually running then the spin step is skipped.
+then a thread attempting to acquire the mutex will spin rather than yielding
+the processor.
Mutexes fully support priority propagation.
.Pp
See
.Xr mutex 9
for details.
-.Ss Spin mutexes
-Spin mutexes are variation of basic mutexes; the main difference between
-the two is that spin mutexes never yield the processor - instead, they spin,
-waiting for the thread holding the lock,
-(which must be running on another CPU), to release it.
-Spin mutexes disable interrupts while the held so as to not get pre-empted.
-Since disabling interrupts is expensive, they are also generally slower.
-Spin mutexes should be used only when necessary, e.g. to protect data shared
+.Ss Spin Mutexes
+Spin mutexes are a variation of basic mutexes; the main difference between
+the two is that spin mutexes never block.
+Instead, they spin while waiting for the lock to be released.
+Note that a thread that holds a spin mutex must never yield its CPU to
+avoid deadlock.
+Unlike ordinary mutexes, spin mutexes disable interrupts when acquired.
+Since disabling interrupts can be expensive, they are generally slower to
+acquire and release.
+Spin mutexes should be used only when absolutely necessary,
+e.g. to protect data shared
with interrupt filter code (see
.Xr bus_setup_intr 9
-for details).
-.Ss Pool mutexes
-With most synchronization primitives, such as mutexes, programmer must
-provide a piece of allocated memory to hold the primitive.
+for details),
+or for scheduler internals.
+.Ss Mutex Pools
+With most synchronization primitives, such as mutexes, the programmer must
+provide memory to hold the primitive.
For example, a mutex may be embedded inside the structure it protects.
-Pool mutex is a variant of mutex without this requirement - to lock or unlock
-a pool mutex, one uses address of the structure being protected with it,
-not the mutex itself.
-Pool mutexes are seldom used.
+Mutex pools provide a preallocated set of mutexes to avoid this
+requirement.
+Note that mutexes from a pool may only be used as leaf locks.
.Pp
See
.Xr mtx_pool 9
for details.
-.Ss Reader/writer locks
-Reader/writer locks allow shared access to protected data by multiple threads,
+.Ss Reader/Writer Locks
+Reader/writer locks allow shared access to protected data by multiple threads
or exclusive access by a single thread.
The threads with shared access are known as
.Em readers
@@ -91,26 +90,16 @@ since it may modify protected data.
Reader/writer locks can be treated as mutexes (see above and
.Xr mutex 9 )
with shared/exclusive semantics.
-More specifically, regular mutexes can be
-considered to be equivalent to a write-lock on an
-.Em rw_lock.
-The
-.Em rw_lock
-locks have priority propagation like mutexes, but priority
-can be propagated only to an exclusive holder.
+Reader/writer locks support priority propagation like mutexes,
+but priority is propagated only to an exclusive holder.
This limitation comes from the fact that shared owners
are anonymous.
-Another important property is that shared holders of
-.Em rw_lock
-can recurse, but exclusive locks are not allowed to recurse.
-This ability should not be used lightly and
-.Em may go away.
.Pp
See
.Xr rwlock 9
for details.
-.Ss Read-mostly locks
-Mostly reader locks are similar to
+.Ss Read-Mostly Locks
+Read-mostly locks are similar to
.Em reader/writer
locks but optimized for very infrequent write locking.
.Em Read-mostly
@@ -122,21 +111,41 @@ data structure.
See
.Xr rmlock 9
for details.
+.Ss Sleepable Read-Mostly Locks
+Sleepable read-mostly locks are a variation on read-mostly locks.
+Threads holding an exclusive lock may sleep,
+but threads holding a shared lock may not.
+Priority is propagated to shared owners but not to exclusive owners.
.Ss Shared/exclusive locks
Shared/exclusive locks are similar to reader/writer locks; the main difference
-between them is that shared/exclusive locks may be held during unbounded sleep
-(and may thus perform an unbounded sleep).
-They are inherently less efficient than mutexes, reader/writer locks
-and read-mostly locks.
-They do not support priority propagation.
-They should be considered to be closely related to
-.Xr sleep 9 .
-They could in some cases be
-considered a conditional sleep.
+between them is that shared/exclusive locks may be held during unbounded sleep.
+Acquiring a contested shared/exclusive lock can perform an unbounded sleep.
+These locks do not support priority propagation.
.Pp
See
.Xr sx 9
for details.
+.Ss Lockmanager locks
+Lockmanager locks are sleepable shared/exclusive locks used mostly in
+.Xr VFS 9
+.Po
+as a
+.Xr vnode 9
+lock
+.Pc
+and in the buffer cache
+.Po
+.Xr BUF_LOCK 9
+.Pc .
+They have features other lock types do not have such as sleep
+timeouts, blocking upgrades,
+writer starvation avoidance, draining, and an interlock mutex,
+but this makes them complicated to both use and implement;
+for this reason, they should be avoided.
+.Pp
+See
+.Xr lock 9
+for details.
.Ss Counting semaphores
Counting semaphores provide a mechanism for synchronizing access
to a pool of resources.
@@ -149,43 +158,21 @@ See
.Xr sema 9
for details.
.Ss Condition variables
-Condition variables are used in conjunction with mutexes to wait for
-conditions to occur.
-A thread must hold the mutex before calling the
-.Fn cv_wait* ,
+Condition variables are used in conjunction with locks to wait for
+a condition to become true.
+A thread must hold the associated lock before calling one of the
+.Fn cv_wait ,
functions.
-When a thread waits on a condition, the mutex
-is atomically released before the thread yields the processor,
-then reacquired before the function call returns.
+When a thread waits on a condition, the lock
+is atomically released before the thread yields the processor
+and reacquired before the function call returns.
+Condition variables may be used with blocking mutexes,
+reader/writer locks, read-mostly locks, and shared/exclusive locks.
.Pp
See
.Xr condvar 9
for details.
-.Ss Giant
-Giant is an instance of a mutex, with some special characteristics:
-.Bl -enum
-.It
-It is recursive.
-.It
-Drivers can request that Giant be locked around them
-by not marking themselves MPSAFE.
-Note that infrastructure to do this is slowly going away as non-MPSAFE
-drivers either became properly locked or disappear.
-.It
-Giant must be locked first before other locks.
-.It
-It is OK to hold Giant while performing unbounded sleep; in such case,
-Giant will be dropped before sleeping and picked up after wakeup.
-.It
-There are places in the kernel that drop Giant and pick it back up
-again.
-Sleep locks will do this before sleeping.
-Parts of the network or VM code may do this as well, depending on the
-setting of a sysctl.
-This means that you cannot count on Giant keeping other code from
-running if your code sleeps, even if you want it to.
-.El
-.Ss Sleep/wakeup
+.Ss Sleep/Wakeup
The functions
.Fn tsleep ,
.Fn msleep ,
@@ -194,7 +181,12 @@ The functions
.Fn wakeup ,
and
.Fn wakeup_one
-handle event-based thread blocking.
+also handle event-based thread blocking.
+Unlike condition variables,
+arbitrary addresses may be used as wait channels and an dedicated
+structure does not need to be allocated.
+However, care must be taken to ensure that wait channel addresses are
+unique to an event.
If a thread must wait for an external event, it is put to sleep by
.Fn tsleep ,
.Fn msleep ,
@@ -214,9 +206,10 @@ the thread is being put to sleep.
All threads sleeping on a single
.Fa chan
are woken up later by
-.Fn wakeup ,
-often called from inside an interrupt routine, to indicate that the
-resource the thread was blocking on is available now.
+.Fn wakeup
+.Pq often called from inside an interrupt routine
+to indicate that the
+event the thread was blocking on has occurred.
.Pp
Several of the sleep functions including
.Fn msleep ,
@@ -232,122 +225,168 @@ includes the
flag, then the lock will not be reacquired before returning.
The lock is used to ensure that a condition can be checked atomically,
and that the current thread can be suspended without missing a
-change to the condition, or an associated wakeup.
+change to the condition or an associated wakeup.
In addition, all of the sleep routines will fully drop the
.Va Giant
mutex
-(even if recursed)
+.Pq even if recursed
while the thread is suspended and will reacquire the
.Va Giant
-mutex before the function returns.
+mutex
+.Pq restoring any recursion
+before the function returns.
.Pp
-See
-.Xr sleep 9
-for details.
-.Ss Lockmanager locks
-Shared/exclusive locks, used mostly in
-.Xr VFS 9 ,
-in particular as a
-.Xr vnode 9
-lock.
-They have features other lock types do not have, such as sleep timeout,
-writer starvation avoidance, draining, and interlock mutex, but this makes them
-complicated to implement; for this reason, they are deprecated.
+The
+.Fn pause
+function is a special sleep function that waits for a specified
+amount of time to pass before the thread resumes execution.
+This sleep cannot be terminated early by either an explicit
+.Fn wakeup
+or a signal.
.Pp
See
-.Xr lock 9
+.Xr sleep 9
for details.
+.Ss Giant
+Giant is a special mutex used to protect data structures that do not
+yet have their own locks.
+Since it provides semantics akin to the old
+.Xr spl 9
+interface,
+Giant has special characteristics:
+.Bl -enum
+.It
+It is recursive.
+.It
+Drivers can request that Giant be locked around them
+by not marking themselves MPSAFE.
+Note that infrastructure to do this is slowly going away as non-MPSAFE
+drivers either became properly locked or disappear.
+.It
+Giant must be locked before other non-sleepable locks.
+.It
+Giant is dropped during unbounded sleeps and reacquired after wakeup.
+.It
+There are places in the kernel that drop Giant and pick it back up
+again.
+Sleep locks will do this before sleeping.
+Parts of the network or VM code may do this as well.
+This means that you cannot count on Giant keeping other code from
+running if your code sleeps, even if you want it to.
+.El
.Sh INTERACTIONS
-The primitives interact and have a number of rules regarding how
+The primitives can interact and have a number of rules regarding how
they can and can not be combined.
-Many of these rules are checked using the
-.Xr witness 4
-code.
-.Ss Bounded vs. unbounded sleep
-The following primitives perform bounded sleep:
- mutexes, pool mutexes, reader/writer locks and read-mostly locks.
-.Pp
-The following primitives may perform an unbounded sleep:
-shared/exclusive locks, counting semaphores, condition variables, sleep/wakeup and lockmanager locks.
-.Pp
+Many of these rules are checked by
+.Xr witness 4 .
+.Ss Bounded vs. Unbounded Sleep
+A bounded sleep
+.Pq or blocking
+is a sleep where the only resource needed to resume execution of a thread
+is CPU time for the owner of a lock that the thread is waiting to acquire.
+An unbounded sleep
+.Po
+often referred to as simply
+.Dq sleeping
+.Pc
+is a sleep where a thread is waiting for an external event or for a condition
+to become true.
+In particular,
+since there is always CPU time available,
+a dependency chain of threads in bounded sleeps should always make forward
+progress.
+This requires that no thread in a bounded sleep is waiting for a lock held
+by a thread in an unbounded sleep.
+To avoid priority inversions,
+a thread in a bounded sleep lends its priority to the owner of the lock
+that it is waiting for.
+.Pp
+The following primitives perform bounded sleeps:
+mutexes, reader/writer locks and read-mostly locks.
+.Pp
+The following primitives perform unbounded sleeps:
+sleepable read-mostly locks, shared/exclusive locks, lockmanager locks,
+counting semaphores, condition variables, and sleep/wakeup.
+.Ss General Principles
+.Bl -bullet
+.It
It is an error to do any operation that could result in yielding the processor
while holding a spin mutex.
+.It
+It is an error to do any operation that could result in unbounded sleep
+while holding any primitive from the 'bounded sleep' group.
+For example, it is an error to try to acquire a shared/exclusive lock while
+holding a mutex, or to try to allocate memory with M_WAITOK while holding a
+reader/writer lock.
.Pp
-As a general rule, it is an error to do any operation that could result
-in unbounded sleep while holding any primitive from the 'bounded sleep' group.
-For example, it is an error to try to acquire shared/exclusive lock while
-holding mutex, or to try to allocate memory with M_WAITOK while holding
-read-write lock.
-.Pp
-As a special case, it is possible to call
+Note that the lock passed to one of the
.Fn sleep
or
-.Fn mtx_sleep
-while holding a single mutex.
-It will atomically drop that mutex and reacquire it as part of waking up.
-This is often a bad idea because it generally relies on the programmer having
-good knowledge of all of the call graph above the place where
-.Fn mtx_sleep
-is being called and assumptions the calling code has made.
-Because the lock gets dropped during sleep, one must re-test all
-the assumptions that were made before, all the way up the call graph to the
-place where the lock was acquired.
-.Pp
+.Fn cv_wait
+functions is dropped before the thread enters the unbounded sleep and does
+not violate this rule.
+.It
It is an error to do any operation that could result in yielding of
the processor when running inside an interrupt filter.
-.Pp
+.It
It is an error to do any operation that could result in unbounded sleep when
running inside an interrupt thread.
+.El
.Ss Interaction table
The following table shows what you can and can not do while holding
-one of the synchronization primitives discussed:
-.Bl -column ".Ic xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" ".Xr XXXXXXXXX" ".Xr XXXXXXX" ".Xr XXXXXXX" ".Xr XXXXXXX" ".Xr XXXXXX" -offset indent
-.It Em " You want:" Ta spin-mtx Ta mutex Ta rwlock Ta rmlock Ta sx Ta sleep
-.It Em "You have: " Ta ------ Ta ------ Ta ------ Ta ------ Ta ------ Ta ------
-.It spin mtx Ta \&ok-1 Ta \&no Ta \&no Ta \&no Ta \&no Ta \&no-3
-.It mutex Ta \&ok Ta \&ok-1 Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&no Ta \&no-3
-.It rwlock Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok-2 Ta \&ok Ta \&no Ta \&no-3
-.It rmlock Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok-2 Ta \&no-5 Ta \&no-5
-.It sx Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&no-2 Ta \&ok-4
+one of the locking primitives discussed. Note that
+.Dq sleep
+includes
+.Fn sema_wait ,
+.Fn sema_timedwait ,
+any of the
+.Fn cv_wait
+functions,
+and any of the
+.Fn sleep
+functions.
+.Bl -column ".Ic xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" ".Xr XXXXXXXXX" ".Xr XXXXXXXXX" ".Xr XXXXXXX" ".Xr XXXXXXXXX" ".Xr XXXXXX" -offset 3n
+.It Em " You want:" Ta spin mtx Ta mutex/rw Ta rmlock Ta sleep rm Ta sx/lk Ta sleep
+.It Em "You have: " Ta -------- Ta -------- Ta ------ Ta -------- Ta ------ Ta ------
+.It spin mtx Ta \&ok Ta \&no Ta \&no Ta \&no Ta \&no Ta \&no-1
+.It mutex/rw Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&no Ta \&no Ta \&no-1
+.It rmlock Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&no Ta \&no Ta \&no-1
+.It sleep rm Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok-2 Ta \&ok-2 Ta \&ok-2/3
+.It sx Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok-3
+.It lockmgr Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok
.El
.Pp
.Em *1
-Recursion is defined per lock.
-Lock order is important.
+There are calls that atomically release this primitive when going to sleep
+and reacquire it on wakeup
+.Po
+.Fn mtx_sleep ,
+.Fn rw_sleep ,
+.Fn msleep_spin ,
+etc.
+.Pc .
.Pp
.Em *2
-Readers can recurse though writers can not.
-Lock order is important.
+These cases are only allowed while holding a write lock on a sleepable
+read-mostly lock.
.Pp
.Em *3
-There are calls that atomically release this primitive when going to sleep
-and reacquire it on wakeup (e.g.
-.Fn mtx_sleep ,
-.Fn rw_sleep
-and
-.Fn msleep_spin ) .
-.Pp
-.Em *4
-Though one can sleep holding an sx lock, one can also use
-.Fn sx_sleep
-which will atomically release this primitive when going to sleep and
+Though one can sleep while holding this lock,
+one can also use a
+.Fn sleep
+function to atomically release this primitive when going to sleep and
reacquire it on wakeup.
.Pp
-.Em *5
-.Em Read-mostly
-locks can be initialized to support sleeping while holding a write lock.
-See
-.Xr rmlock 9
-for details.
+Note that non-blocking try operations on locks are always permitted.
.Ss Context mode table
The next table shows what can be used in different contexts.
At this time this is a rather easy to remember table.
-.Bl -column ".Ic Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" ".Xr XXXXXXXXX" ".Xr XXXXXXX" ".Xr XXXXXXX" ".Xr XXXXXXX" ".Xr XXXXXX" -offset indent
-.It Em "Context:" Ta spin mtx Ta mutex Ta sx Ta rwlock Ta rmlock Ta sleep
+.Bl -column ".Ic Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" ".Xr XXXXXXXXX" ".Xr XXXXXXXXX" ".Xr XXXXXXX" ".Xr XXXXXXXXX" ".Xr XXXXXX" -offset 3n
+.It Em "Context:" Ta spin mtx Ta mutex/rw Ta rmlock Ta sleep rm Ta sx/lk Ta sleep
.It interrupt filter: Ta \&ok Ta \&no Ta \&no Ta \&no Ta \&no Ta \&no
-.It interrupt thread: Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&no Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&no
-.It callout: Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&no Ta \&ok Ta \&no Ta \&no
-.It syscall: Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok
+.It interrupt thread: Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&no Ta \&no Ta \&no
+.It callout: Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&no Ta \&no Ta \&no
+.It system call: Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok Ta \&ok
.El
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr witness 4 ,
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