Now I'm trying to think of other places to use this trick. :)
You don't have to do anything heavy weight like stop all the threads, instead you can just pull their PCs out and check them. Sure, they may have moved on (and even back into the critical section) by the time you call free, but it doesn't matter because they'll be using the new cache buffer. The downside is that you might get false positives for the critical section, but you can either run the dealloc in a loop or defer it and try again later.
Your suggestion sounds akin to replacing a mutex acquire with an "is the lock held?" [like trylock with 0 timeout, then immediate release]. Observing that it's unheld at time t makes no guarantee it won't be held by the time of your next instruction. It therefore becomes a meaningless check, not useful at all for real synchronization.
[PS: mentioned this on HN before, but my favorite "observe the PC as part of a synchronization primitive" hack was this one from Linux on armv5: http://lwn.net/Articles/314561/]
[PPS: How much does objc_msgSend() do inline and how much is external calls? This PC hack seems like it could have huge holes if some of its critical work is done in a non-inlined function.]
Basically you have:
cache = <newval>
if ok() {
free(<oldval>)
}
// maybe someone here gets a reference to <oldval> (1)
cache = <newval>
// from this point onward no one can reference <oldval>
if ok() {
free(<oldval>)
}
Imagine ok() pauses all threads. It sees if any threads threads are in BAD=[PC_BAD_START, PC_BAD_END]. If yes, return false, if no, return true.
Now imagine PC doesn't pause the threads. What can happen?
A thread that was in BAD leaves BAD. That's fine.
A thread that wasn't in BAD enters BAD. But that will use <newval>, so that's fine too.
That thread that was in BAD leaves BAD, and then reenters. That's also fine.
So there's no problem.
(re your question, I believe objc_msgSend is hand optimized assembly that doesn't make any function calls; if it did, you'd just have to make sure to include those functions in the range of bad PC addresses.)
Right. The problem with doing this while other threads are running is that ok() can return true, correctly so for its point in time, then immediately after ok() returns another thread could enter objc_msgSend() while you are inside free(). Maybe ok() ran on thread A while thread B was right at unrelated function foo()'s "call objc_msgSend" instruction. The check is OK at a point in time, but perhaps by the time you enter free() thread B did an unsafe read.
> A thread that wasn't in BAD enters BAD. But that will use <newval>, so that's fine too.
You can't make guarantees that it will see newval. Whether or not it does depends on timing. For example, maybe the guy who calls ok() gets a page fault or is on a very busy CPU with lots of preemption happening. That will alter timing in the direction of this being unsafe. Cache coherence may also be an issue here.
cache = <newval>
That's what makes the trick work w/o having to pause threads.
As written, that is not a guarantee that all cores will see <newval> immediately. It's very CPU-specific but you may need memory fences to achieve this.
Further, in my opinion it's kind of playing with fire.
Edit: Also, it is my impression reading the article that <oldval> is actually a shared list of old caches to be freed (gOldCachesList). That makes it a lot more complicated than your example snippet and leaves more potential for nasty synchronization problems.
A stale cache pointer may become wrong if a method implementation is replaced, e.g. by a category, but replacing a method while calling it in another thread is inherently racey.
You can't "kinda" have synchronization just as a design for a mutex can't be a "kinda" lock... You may get away with it for a while, but like I said, playing with fire.
This all about optimizing things so the read side doesn't have to do any synchronization. The actual implementation takes locks in functions that mutate the cache, it is just done in such a way that read side always sees consistent data without taking a lock. Since the write side has locks it can safely queue stuff for deletion is actually pretty trivial.
As for playing with fire... the core dispatch routine of your runtime is exactly the place you want to complicated things that exploit innate knowledge of your architecture. It is a small piece of code that is incredibly hot and will get a lot of scrutiny.
So the efficiency of the algorithms stems from disabling interrupts within the reader's critical section, which can only be done in kernel mode (otherwise you could do really bad things). A similar algorithm in userspace will need to find another mechanism to wait for all readers to exit the CS, which may or may not be efficient. They may share then name "RCU", but not its desirable qualities.
There are, AFAIK, several different algorithms calling themselves userspace RCU. One userspace RCU algorithm I've seen essentially protects the deallocation with a read-write, which isn't known for terrific scalability, but I don't know, they may have come up with something better.
Garbage collection is the Achille's heel of all nonblocking data structures. As far as I know, there is no algorithm more efficient than a general purpose GC just yet, which is both generally applicable and efficient.
Common authorship, BTW, says little. Most concurrent algorithms out there were invented by a handful of people.
The efficiency stems from having little to zero synchronization cost for readers in a read-mostly workload or workload that just isn't update-intensive. In addition to that, note that a deferral interface is available so writers basically never have to block until it is actually safe to free memory. URCU and ck_epoch all share those desirable qualities.
2) "RCU algorithm I've seen ... protects with a read-write"
The synchronize portion of RCU and RCU-like systems is almost always heavy-weight. Applications that adopt URCU can typically afford this.
3) "no algorithm more efficient than a general purpose GC"
All the blocking schemes are magnitudes more efficient but the trade-off is that it isn't generally applicable. However, they're still applicable for plenty of workloads. We are starting to see more GC mechanisms adopt SMR-like techniques so that may change.
4) "Common authorship, BTW, says little"
Not in this case.
If you would like to learn more about the performance trade-off with the various mechanisms, I suggest http://www.rdrop.com/users/paulmck/RCU/hart_ipdps06.pdf and the URCU paper as a start. I've some additional numbers on something similar at http://concurrencykit.org/presentations/ebr.pdf
Paul also has a good introduction up at https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2488549
That's the advantage of any copy-on-write concurrency mechanism. The "magic" of RCU (unless you define any copy-on-write algorithm as RCU) is the indifference of the algorithm complexity to the number of threads involved -- only the number of cores. I am not aware of userspace algorithms that display this property, but I may be wrong about that.
> All the blocking schemes are magnitudes more efficient but the trade-off is that it isn't generally applicable.
But that's where things get tricky. Magnitudes more efficient how? Total throughput? Maximum latency? I can certainly believe the latter but I doubt the former. Hazard-pointer techniques basically are how modern GCs work, with the difference of when the scans are triggered.
Cores versus threads is a detail of the execution environment which may affect RCU implementation but not the actual magic. For example, a lot of work was necessary to get RCU to scale to many hundreds of cores in the kernel (http://lwn.net/Articles/305782/ is one example).
For ck_epoch, we had to implement a proxy collection-like pattern for workloads involving thousands of concurrent events that required longer-lived hazardous references (thanks to John Esmet for this work)...this will hit upstream as ck_epc and is sitting in a pull request on the github page (http://github.com/concurrencykit/ck).
re:Efficiency, magnitudes more efficient on read-side in all ways (including throughput and latency) assuming that delete frequency is not too heavy and that you can afford write-side blocking. Consider that the read-side has few to none atomic operations on the fast path, and if so, is typically on exclusively written memory and it does not block in any fashion. This means readers scale and are very fast. You might enjoy the paper I linked to which exposes some of the performance characteristics (it isn't exhaustive, it doesn't explore real-world implications on memory usage as update frequency increases, for example, but it's a great start). Paul also has some refreshed performance analysis in his ACM Queue article. If you couple this with specialized concurrently readable data structures (like http://backtrace.io/blog/blog/2015/03/13/workload-specializa...), you get super sexy performance for readers.
You might also be interested in "passive reader-writer locks", which provide similar costs on the fast path to RCU for TSO architectures while still providing read-write lock semantics...but at the cost of exceptionally more expensive write-side synchronization (and user-space support requires some kernel modifications).
More efficient than what? RCU with a general-purpose GC? I thought that's what we were talking about.
In our in-memory database (written in Java), we use what you call RCU (I had no idea any copy-on-write without any synchronization on the read side is called RCU) where we can for read-mostly data, but the problem is that in some data structures, nodes may be referenced by two references (or more), so since we don't have DCAS, we can't do the atomic replacement of the node (in some circumstances we can forgo the transactional update of on one of the references, so we can do RCU). Another problem is that some writes must block reads to ensure transaction isolation. Instead, to reduce the cost of reads updating a read-write lock, we use optimistic locking that also ensures a reader requires no memory writes, but may retry due to a concurrent writer.
With most managed languages I've played with, I haven't found a compelling reason to use RCU-like mechanisms (except if it involves some FFI boundary or embedded language in unmanaged system).
What you're doing sounds like a seqlock pattern (see ck_sequence) or generation counter, not RCU. Fundamental to all RCU implementations is "grace period detection" (detection of the point in which it is safe to free memory) occurring without any read-side delays. With RCU, a reader never has to retry due to RCU itself.
RCU is really special in an unmanaged language, but I'm not sure it's that interesting for developers working in a managed language (unless they happen to be solving safe memory reclamation).
But just to get the definitions straight: what you call RCU is a copy-on-write combined with a GC algorithm. What would you call a copy-on-write (with no synchronization on the reader's end whatsoever) that uses a general-purpose GC?
Also, I don't understand how hazard pointer GC can be more efficient than a general-purpose GC, given that modern GCs work based on the same principle, only much more refined (e.g. HotSpot creates a stack map containing the location of each reference in every thread's stack instead of a hazard pointer list). Of course compacting collectors (usually young-generation) don't do any reclamation work at all, instead they only work to copy the live objects, so it all comes down to the question what do you have more, live objects or dead objects? But in any case, simple hazard pointer mechanisms seem like a crude, rather old, non-compacting GC technique. I don't see how they can beat a good general-purpose GC.
RCU is being conflated, the (Hart) paper I linked to will addresses your questions (sorry phone).
RCU refers to a wide array of reclamation implementations and some URCU implementations do indeed have a lot in common with kernel-space RCU (which also has a myriad of implementations).
Speaking of liburcu in specific, the "brittleness" is a function of your workload and your selection of the URCU implementation. The various implementations have different trade-offs, and it is definitely possible to livelock write-side or degrade read-side if you make the wrong design decisions. For example, there are major differences between signal-based URCU and QSBR URCU. No reclamation mechanism (whether one backed by RCU or something like hazard pointers) is a silver bullet and each will suck in fantastic ways with the right workload.
As far as userspace RCU algorithms in general being "experimental", plenty of people are using RCU or RCU-like mechanisms in user-space for production systems as a scalable synchronization solution. For example, the Concurrency Kit library (http://concurrencykit.org) has an RCU-like system called ck_epoch, and it sees at least billions of transactions in production a day without fail, and even supports freestanding environments.