cross-thread data sharing

François Perrad francois.perrad at gadz.org
Wed Jun 2 14:39:36 UTC 2010


2010/6/2 Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at gmail.com>

> Chandon's GSoC project is already starting to highlight some
> unresolved related issues we have in Parrot. Perhaps the most
> important is how we control cross-thread data corruption. We used to
> have an STM system though it was non-functional. We've recently also
> removed a "_sync" member of the PMC structure which ostensibly would
> have been used to perform fine-grained locking of shared PMCs. Both of
> those things were unused and unfunctional at the time they were
> removed, but we are going to need to replace them with something
> eventually, especially if we ever want to have proper threads support.
> Throughout this email I'm going to be using the term "threads" to mean
> OS-level threads, not the new "Green Threads" that Chandon is working
> on (in Green Threads, data corruption is a much much smaller problem).
>
> An obvious choice would be to create a new STM implementation. Done
> right, we wouldn't need to add new fields to the PMC structure and we
> could avoid almost all locking. Plus, there are several libraries out
> there that we could tap into to get STM "for free". I think there are
> some STM libraries affiliated with the LLVM project as well, so we
> might be able to tap into those at the same time we're adding an
> LLVM-based JIT backend. Implementing simple STM shouldn't be too big a
> project. However, doing it correctly and robustly, following all the
> current research on optimization and whatever is much harder. If we
> want to go the route of using STM, we should seriously evaluate some
> existing libraries.
>
> With our shiny new immutable strings implementation we already don't
> have to worry about locking strings because they can't be written to
> and therefore can't be corrupted. We may need to make some changes to
> the implementation to make sure there are no exceptions and that a
> reference to a STRING cannot escape into PIR land before it has been
> completely constructed and write-projected. We also obviously don't
> need to worry about locking INTVALs and FLOATVALs, since those aren't
> passed internally by reference. So a better question than "how do we
> safely share PMCs" might be "How do we stop sharing PMCs entirely?".
> If PMCs were not shared, or if we create clones when we pass a PMC
> from one thread to another, we don't need to worry about locks or safe
> sharing. Thread-based COW on PMCs would do the same job.
>
> If PMCs can only be written from the thread that they originated from,
> other threads could schedule method/vtable calls as "messages" on the
> originating thread when updates need to be made. This can either raise
> performance issues, where for every method or vtable call we send a
> message a yield to allow the message to complete processing, or we
> would require threads to be aware of the shared state of PMCs and
> manually wait over some kind of flag until a batch of messages is
> processed.
>
> We really need to consider whether we want PMCs to be transparently
> modifiable by reference across multiple threads. If they are, we need
> a system for managing either locks or atomic transactions, up to and
> maybe including some kind of GIL. If they are not, we need to consider
> a system for messaging.
>
> I don't think we're going to need to have any kind of system in place
> for Chandon to continue his work and even reach a successful
> conclusion. However, without a mechanism for data sharing any uses of
> threads will need to either explicitly avoid data sharing entirely or
> take the risk of crashing with fire.
>
> --Andrew Whitworth
>

For another example, see
http://lists.parrot.org/pipermail/parrot-dev/2010-May/004238.html

François


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