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c - Can a correct fail-safe process-shared barrier be implemented on Linux?

In a past question, I asked about implementing pthread barriers without destruction races:

How can barriers be destroyable as soon as pthread_barrier_wait returns?

and received from Michael Burr with a perfect solution for process-local barriers, but which fails for process-shared barriers. We later worked through some ideas, but never reached a satisfactory conclusion, and didn't even begin to get into resource failure cases.

Is it possible on Linux to make a barrier that meets these conditions:

  • Process-shared (can be created in any shared memory).
  • Safe to unmap or destroy the barrier from any thread immediately after the barrier wait function returns.
  • Cannot fail due to resource allocation failure.

Michael's attempt at solving the process-shared case (see the linked question) has the unfortunate property that some kind of system resource must be allocated at wait time, meaning the wait can fail. And it's unclear what a caller could reasonably do when a barrier wait fails, since the whole point of the barrier is that it's unsafe to proceed until the remaining N-1 threads have reached it...

A kernel-space solution might be the only way, but even that's difficult due to the possibility of a signal interrupting the wait with no reliable way to resume it...

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This is not possible with the Linux futex API, and I think this can be proven as well.

We have here essentially a scenario in which N processes must be reliably awoken by one final process, and further no process may touch any shared memory after the final awakening (as it may be destroyed or reused asynchronously). While we can awaken all processes easily enough, the fundamental race condition is between the wakeup and the wait; if we issue the wakeup before the wait, the straggler never wakes up.

The usual solution to something like this is to have the straggler check a status variable atomically with the wait; this allows it to avoid sleeping at all if the wakeup has already occurred. However, we cannot do this here - as soon as the wakeup becomes possible, it is unsafe to touch shared memory!

One other approach is to actually check if all processes have gone to sleep yet. However, this is not possible with the Linux futex API; the only indication of number of waiters is the return value from FUTEX_WAKE; if it returns less than the number of waiters you expected, you know some weren't asleep yet. However, even if we find out we haven't woken enough waiters, it's too late to do anything - one of the processes that did wake up may have destroyed the barrier already!

So, unfortunately, this kind of immediately-destroyable primitive cannot be constructed with the Linux futex API.

Note that in the specific case of one waiter, one waker, it may be possible to work around the problem; if FUTEX_WAKE returns zero, we know nobody has actually been awoken yet, so you have a chance to recover. Making this into an efficient algorithm, however, is quite tricky.

It's tricky to add a robust extension to the futex model that would fix this. The basic problem is, we need to know when N threads have successfully entered their wait, and atomically awaken them all. However, any of those threads may leave the wait to run a signal handler at any time - indeed, the waker thread may also leave the wait for signal handlers as well.

One possible way that may work, however, is an extension to the keyed event model in the NT API. With keyed events, threads are released from the lock in pairs; if you have a 'release' without a 'wait', the 'release' call blocks for the 'wait'.

This in itself isn't enough due to the issues with signal handlers; however, if we allow for the 'release' call to specify a number of threads to be awoken atomically, this works. You simply have each thread in the barrier decrement a count, then 'wait' on a keyed event on that address. The last thread 'releases' N - 1 threads. The kernel doesn't allow any wake event to be processed until all N-1 threads have entered this keyed event state; if any thread leaves the futex call due to signals (including the releasing thread), this prevents any wakeups at all until all threads are back.


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