Is a lock (threading) atomic? - multithreading

This may sound like a stupid question, but if one locks a resource in a multi-threaded app, then the operation that happens on the resource, is that done atomically?
I.E.: can the processor be interrupted or can a context switch occur while that resource has a lock on it? If it does, then nothing else can access this resource until it's scheduled back in to finish off it's process. Sounds like an expensive operation.

The processor can very definitely still switch to another thread, yes. Indeed, in most modern computers there can be multiple threads running simultaneously anyway. The locking just makes sure that no other thread can acquire the same lock, so you can make sure that an operation on that resource is atomic in terms of that resource. Code using other resources can operate completely independently.
You should usually lock for short operations wherever possible. You can also choose the granularity of locks... for example, if you have two independent variables in a shared object, you could use two separate locks to protect access to those variables. That will potentially provide better concurrency - but at the same time, more locks means more complexity and more potential for deadlock. There's always a balancing act when it comes to concurrency.

You're exactly right. That's one reason why it's so important to lock for short period of time. However, this isn't as bad as it sounds because no other thread that's waiting on the lock will get scheduled until the thread holding the lock releases it.

Yes, a context switch can definitely occur.
This is exactly why when accessing a shared resource it is important to lock it from another thread as well. When thread A has the lock, thread B cannot access the code locked.
For example if two threads run the following code:
1. lock(l);
2. -- change shared resource S here --
3. unlock(l);
A context switch can occur after step 1, but the other thread cannot hold the lock at that time, and therefore, cannot change the shared resource. If access to the shared resource on one of the threads is done without a lock - bad things can happen!
Regarding the wastefulness, yes, it is a wasteful method. This is why there are methods that try to avoid locks altogether. These methods are called lock-free, and some of them are based on strong locking services such as CAS (Compare-And-Swap) or others.

No, it's not really expensive. There are typically only two possibilities:
1) The system has other things it can do: In this case, the system is still doing useful work with all available cores.
2) The system doesn't have anything else to do: In this case, the thread that holds the lock will be scheduled. A sane system won't leave a core unused while there's a ready-to-run thread that's not scheduled.
So, how can it be expensive? If there's nothing else for the system to do that doesn't require acquiring that lock (or not enough other things to occupy all cores) and the thread holding the lock is not ready-to-run. So that's the case you have to avoid, and the context switch or pre-empt issue doesn't matter (since the thread would be ready-to-run).

Related

why POSIX doesn't provide a robust IPC semaphore(regarding process crash safety)

According to this link, How do I recover a semaphore when the process that decremented it to zero crashes? it seems that there is no robust semaphore inter-process, and the author finally chose filelock, which is guaranteed to be released properly by the system-level or kernel-level control.
But I also found robust mutex provided by pthread https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/pthread_mutexattr_setrobust.3.html why there is no something like robust semaphore?
And an extra question: what robust alternatives we have regarding IPC synchronization? filelock seems to be the best one. I think providing such mechanism is not that difficult from system or kernel level,since they do implement fielock. then why they don't provide some other approaches?
When you use a mutex, it can be acquired by at most one thread at a time. Therefore, once the mutex has been acquired, the owner can write its process ID or thread ID (depending on the system) into the mutex, and future users can detect whether the owner is still alive or not.
However, a semaphore is ultimately a counter. It is possible that different threads may increment or decrement the counter. There isn't intrinsically one resource that is being shared; there could instead be multiple resources.
For example, if we're trying to limit ourselves to a certain number of outgoing connections (say, 8), then we could create a semaphore with that value and allow threads to acquire it (wait) to make a connection, and then increment it (post) when they're done. If we never want to make more than 8 connections at once, the semaphore will never block; we'll have acquired it successfully each time, even though there's no exclusion.
In such a situation, there isn't going to be space inside the semaphore to store every process's thread ID. Using memory allocation is tricky because that code needs to be synchronized independently, and even if that could be solved, it means that a semaphore value would have at least O(N) performance when acquiring the semaphore. I work on a production system that uses hundreds of threads, so you can imagine the performance problems if we had such a semaphore design.
There are other solutions which you can use when you need robustness, such as file locking or a robust mutex in a shared memory segment, but none of them have the same properties as a semaphore. Therefore, any discussion of what primitives should be used instead depends on the particular needs of the situation (which should probably be placed in a new question).

Kernel Programming - Mutexes

So I'm trying to use mutex_init(), mutex_lock(), mutex_unlock() for thread synchronization.
I am currently trying to schedule threads in a round robin fashion(but more than 1 thread could be running at a time) and I set the current state of a thread to TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE, followed by waking up another thread whose PID, I have in a list.
I need to iterate over this list for my logic.
As I understand it, I need to lock this list as I access its elements, or another thread might miss a new entry while I'm making changes to it. Also, as one mutex has locked a resource, no other mutex can unlock it, until the original mutex releases it.
But, I'm still not sure if I'm locking it correctly. (I release the lock before I call schedule(), and re-lock after that)
I declare a mutex locally within a thread and lock the list. After my current thread locks
mutex_lock(&lock);
and I iterate over the list, till I find something(or ends if it doesn't find anything), then unlocks.
mutex_unlock(&lock);
I assume locking while I iterate is legal. I have never seen examples of this though.
Also, is it normal for the process to have a state of (TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE) while it holds a mutex lock?
EDIT : I am adding some more information based on the answer below.
It is possible my program may be run on a virtual machine with a single core. Therefore, I do not want to risk infinite polling using spin_lock().
I am trying to maintain scheduling between threads that have a certain id. For example if there are 4 threads. 2 in set 'A' and 2 in set 'B'. I allow only 1 thread to run in each set. But I switch between threads in a given set. However, a thread in set 'A' should not switch to any thread in set 'B'
(I know the kernel scheduler wont be perfect, so an approximate switching will do).
My Reasoning for TASK_STATE's:
1) Initial thread that gets created is running.
2) If another thread in the same set is running (and this one hasn't executed for a given time). Set other thread to TASK_INTERRUPTIPLE, while calling schedule(); Note: There can be more than 2 threads in each set, but let's keep it simple by considering only 2 for now.
3) If it has executed for enough time, set this task to TASK_INTERRUPTIPLE, set the other task in the same set to TASK_RUNNING, while calling schedule();
All this logic happens while I am accessing certain data structures which are locked by a (now) Global Mutex. I unlock the mutex just before I call schedule(), and instantly re-lock afterward. After my logic part is done, I completely unlock the mutex.
Is there anything fundamentally wrong with the approach?
As I understand it, I need to lock this list as I access its elements
Yes, that is true. But if you use a mutex, you're going to be really sad because a call to lock/unlock is a call to the scheduler. Therefore, calling it from inside the scheduler should result in deadlock. What you need to do depends on if your processor is multi-core or (the mythical) single-core. (Is this a virtual system?) On a single-core processor you can disable interrupts. On a multi-core processor, disabling interrupts is not sufficient (it only disables interrupts for that one core, and another core may still be interrupted). The simplest thing to do on a multi-core is to use a spinlock. Unlike the mutex, both of these locking mechanisms can be unlocked from different threads.
I set the current state of a thread to TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE
Is the thread being taken off the CPU? If so, it's not running, so I suspect that TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE is the wrong state. It would be helpful if you could list the possible states for me or if you could describe what the state is supposed to indicate. Because to me "TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE" sounds like a running task.
I declare a mutex locally within a thread and lock the list
Local mutexes are a red flag! The resource you are locking should be protected by a mutex with the same scope. If the list is global, it should have a global mutex to protect it. Threads that want to use the list must first acquire its mutex. Of course, as I already talked about, you probably want to use a different kind of locking to protect the list of ready-to-run processes.
I assume locking while I iterate is legal
It is perfectly legal (assuming of course that your mutual exclusion scheme is bug-free). In fact, it's required. If another thread were allowed to, for example, remove a node from the list while you were reading it, you could end up dereferencing a deleted node.
Also, is it normal for the process to have a state of TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE while it holds a mutex lock?
No, not while it holds the lock if the process is currently running on a CPU. A mutex is available to user code. If holding a mutex made the process uninterruptible, that would mean that a process could hijack the system by simply locking a mutex and never releasing it. Now, you will find that the lock and unlock functions need to be uninterruptible on a single-core processor. However, it doesn't make sense to set the state for the process because it's actually the scheduler that must not be interrupted.

Can a thread be context-switched while holding a lock?

How do you take care of context-switching when a thread holds a lock and hence blocks other threads? I would expect it's a very common issue.
On a pre-emptive multi-tasking system, you can't prevent yourself from being switched out while holding a lock. But since anything else that's waiting on the lock (assuming that it's not a spinlock) can't be switched in, this is normally not a problem.
Using a spinlock is almost always a bad idea. There are legitimate cases where things can go badly if you hold a lock too long; you can manage this by ensuring that you hold the lock for the least amount of time possible and that you don't do anything that can block while holding it.
The blocked threads don't run, and eventually the thread holding the lock becomes active again, eventually releasing the lock. You don't have to do anything special beyond the usual nitpicky care needed with multithreaded code.

Is Deadlock recovery possible in MultiThread programming?

Process has some 10 threads and all 10 threads entered DEADLOCK state( assume all are waiting for Mutex variable ).
How can you free process(threads) from DEADLOCK state ? .
Is there any way to kill lower priority thread ?( in Multi process case we can kill lower priority process when all processes in deadlock state).
Can we attach that deadlocked process to the debugger and assign proper value to the Mutex variable ( assume all the threads are waiting on a mutex variable MUT but it is value is 0 and can we assign MUT value to 1 through debugger ) .
If every thread in the app is waiting on every other, and none are set to time out, you're rather screwed. You might be able to run the app in a debugger or something, but locks are generally acquired for a reason -- and manually forcing a mutex to be owned by a thread that didn't legitimately acquire it can cause some big problems (the thread that previously owned it is still going to try and release it, the results of which can be unpredictable if the mutex is unexpectedly yanked away. Could cause an unexpected exception, could cause the mutex to be unlocked while still in use.) Anyway it defeats the whole purpose of mutexes, so you're just covering up a much bigger problem.
There are two common solutions:
Instead of having threads wait forever, set a timeout. This is slightly harder to do in languages like Java that embed mutexes into the language via synchronized or lock blocks, but it's almost always possible. If you time out waiting on the lock, release all the locks/mutexes you had and try later.
Better, but potentially much more complex, is to figure out why everything's fighting for the resource and remove that contention. If you must lock, lock consistently. But if there's 10 threads blocking on a single mutex, that could be a clue either that your operations are badly chunked (ie: that your threads are doing too much or too little at once before trying to acquire a lock), or that there's unnecessary locking going on. Don't lock unless you have to. Some synchronization could be obviated by using collections and algorithms specifically designed to be "lock-free" while still offering thread-safety.
Adding another answer because I don't agree with the solutions proposed by cHao earlier - the analysis is fine.
First, why I disagree with the two solutions offered:
Reduce contention
Contention doesn't lead to deadlocks. It just causes poor performance. Deadlock means no performance whatsoever. Therefore, reducing contention does not solve deadlocks.
timeout on mutex.
A mutex protects a resource, and a thread locks the mutex because it needs the resource. With a timeout, you won't be able to acquire the resource, and your thread fails. Does it solve the deadlock problem? Only if the failing thread releases another resource that was blocking the other threads.
But in that case, there's a much better solution. Mutexes should have a partial ordering. If there is at least one thread that can both mutex A and B, you should decide whether A or B is acquired first, and then stick with that. This must be a transitive order: if you lock A before B, and B before C, then obviously you must lock A before C.
This is a perfect solution to deadlocks. Look back at the timeout example: it only works if the thread that times out waiting on A then releases its lock on B, to release another thread that was waiting on B. In the most simple case, that other thread was itself directly locking A. Thus, the mutexes A and B are not properly ordered. You should have consistently locked either A or B first.
The timeout case could also be the result of a cyclic order problem; one thread locks A then B, another B then C, and a third C then A, with the deadlock happening when each thread owns one lock. The solution again is the same; order the locks.
Alternatively said, mutex lock orders can be described by a directed graph. If a thread locks A before B, there's an arc from A to B. Deadlocks appear if the directed graph is cyclic, and then the arcs of that cycle are the deadlocked threads.
This theory can be a bit complex, but there are some simple insights to be found. For instance, from the graph theory, we know that trees are acyclic graphs. Hence, neither "leaf mutexes" (those that are always locked last) nor "root mutexes" (those that are always locked first) can cause deadlocks. Leaf mutexes are excluded because no thread ever blocks holding them, and root mutexes are excluded because the thread that holds them will be able to lock all subsequent mutexes in due time.

Avoid deadlocks in a multithreaded process

What are the best practices/idioms should someone follow in order to avoid deadlocks?
Please see What are common reasons for deadlocks?
There are four conditions which must occur for deadlock to occur:
Mutual exclusion condition: a resource that cannot be used by more than one process at a time
Hold and wait condition: processes already holding resources may request new resources
No preemption condition: No resource can be forcibly removed from a process holding it, resources can be released only by the explicit action of the process
Circular wait condition: two or more processes form a circular chain where each process waits for a resource that the next process in the chain holds
Avoid at least one of these, and preferably more, and you shouldn't have too many problems.
There is so called Banker's algorithm, for deadlock avoidance. Also you can consider the use of Watch Dog in order to break out form deadlock. Here also few interesting points.
The canonical technique for deadlock avoidance is to have a lock hierarchy. Make sure that all threads acquire locks or other resources in the same order. This avoids the deadlock scenario where thread 1 hold lock A and needs lock B while thread 2 holds lock B and needs lock A. With a lock hierarchy, both threads would have to acquire the locks in the same order (say, A before B).
The best practice would be by defining a class for your thread and use only non-static fields from this class in your thread so your threads won't be sharing any memory.
Of course, to avoid deadlocks you could also avoid the use of semaphores, critical sections and mutexes. Less is better, if you want to avoid deadlocks. Unfortunately, these are required if some memory or other resource is shared between two threads or else you risk corruption of data.
Among the various methods to enter critical sections -- semaphores and mutexs are the most popular.
A semaphore is a waiting mechanism and mutex is a locking mechanism, well the concept is confusing to the most, but in short, a thread activating a mutex can only deactivate it. with this in mind...
Dont allow any process to lock partial no of resources, if a process need 5 resources, wait until all the are available.
if u use semaphore here, u can unblock/un-wait the resource occupied by other thread. by this i mean pre-emption is another reason.
These 2 according to me are the basic conditions, the remaining 2 of the common 4 precautions can be related to these.
If u dont agree ps add comments. I've gtg already late, I will later add a cleaner and clearer explanation.

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