tree 06046ccb6588c4ebf422801296bfbbb7138ed906
parent f519cfaa63662cb704a0cc89136192b742812fce
author Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu> 1628070257 +0200
committer Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu> 1628081376 +0200
encoding latin1

MEDIUM: threads: add a stronger thread_isolate_full() call

The current principle of running under isolation was made to access
sensitive data while being certain that no other thread was using them
in parallel, without necessarily having to place locks everywhere. The
main use case are "show sess" and "show fd" which run over long chains
of pointers.

The thread_isolate() call relies on the "harmless" bit that indicates
for a given thread that it's not currently doing such sensitive things,
which is advertised using thread_harmless_now() and which ends usings
thread_harmless_end(), which also waits for possibly concurrent threads
to complete their work if they took this opportunity for starting
something tricky.

As some system calls were notoriously slow (e.g. mmap()), a bunch of
thread_harmless_now() / thread_harmless_end() were placed around them
to let waiting threads do their work while such other threads were not
able to modify memory contents.

But this is not sufficient for performing memory modifications. One such
example is the server deletion code. By modifying memory, it not only
requires that other threads are not playing with it, but are not either
in the process of touching it. The fact that a pool_alloc() or pool_free()
on some structure may call thread_harmless_now() and let another thread
start to release the same object's memory is not acceptable.

This patch introduces the concept of "idle threads". Threads entering
the polling loop are idle, as well as those that are waiting for all
others to become idle via the new function thread_isolate_full(). Once
thread_isolate_full() is granted, the thread is not idle anymore, and
it is released using thread_release() just like regular isolation. Its
users have to keep in mind that across this call nothing is granted as
another thread might have performed shared memory modifications. But
such users are extremely rare and are actually expecting this from their
peers as well.

Note that that in case of backport, this patch depends on previous patch:
  MINOR: threads: make thread_release() not wait for other ones to complete