thread-utils: introduce optional barrier type

One thread primitive we don't yet support is a barrier: it waits for all threads to reach a synchronization point before letting any of them continue. This would be useful for avoiding the LSan race we see in index-pack (and other places) by having all threads complete their initialization before any of them start to do real work. POSIX introduced a pthread_barrier_t in 2004, which does what we want. But if we want to rely on it: 1. Our Windows pthread emulation would need a new set of wrapper functions. There's a Synchronization Barrier primitive there, which was introduced in Windows 8 (which is old enough for us to depend on). 2. macOS (and possibly other systems) has pthreads but not pthread_barrier_t. So there we'd have to implement our own barrier based on the mutex and cond primitives. Those are do-able, but since we only care about avoiding races in our LSan builds, there's an easier way: make it a noop on systems without a native pthread barrier. This patch introduces a "maybe_thread_barrier" API. The clunky name (rather than just using pthread_barrier directly) should hopefully clue people in that on some systems it will do nothing. It's wired to a Makefile knob which has to be triggered manually, and we enable it for the linux-leaks CI jobs (since we know we'll have it there). There are some other possible options: - we could turn it on all the time for Linux systems based on uname. But we really only care about it for LSan builds, and there is no need to add extra code to regular builds. - we could turn it on only for LSan builds. But that would break builds on non-Linux platforms (like macOS) that otherwise should support sanitizers. - we could trigger only on the combination of Linux and LSan together. This isn't too hard to do, but the uname check isn't completely accurate. It is really about what your libc supports, and non-glibc systems might not have it (though at least musl seems to). So we'd risk breaking builds on those systems, which would need to add a new knob. Though the upside would be that running local "make SANITIZE=leak test" would be protected automatically. And of course none of this protects LSan runs from races on systems without pthread barriers. It's probably OK in practice to protect only our CI jobs, though. The race is rare-ish and most leak-checking happens through CI. Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

Jeff King committed Dec 29, 2024 at 23:28 UTC 7d0037b59ae0d22a2718c28d8e70e3ef3f3f991e
3 files changed +25
Makefile
+7
@@ -141,6 +141,10 @@ include shared.mak
141 #
142 # Define NO_PTHREADS if you do not have or do not want to use Pthreads.
143 #
144 +# Define THREAD_BARRIER_PTHREAD if your system has pthread_barrier_t. Barrier
145 +# support is optional and is only helpful when building with SANITIZE=leak, as
146 +# it is used to eliminate some races in the leak-checker.
147 +#
148 # Define NO_PREAD if you have a problem with pread() system call (e.g.
149 # cygwin1.dll before v1.5.22).
150 #
@@ -2079,6 +2083,9 @@ ifdef NO_PTHREADS
2083 else
2084 BASIC_CFLAGS += $(PTHREAD_CFLAGS)
2085 EXTLIBS += $(PTHREAD_LIBS)
2086 + ifdef THREAD_BARRIER_PTHREAD
2087 + BASIC_CFLAGS += -DTHREAD_BARRIER_PTHREAD
2088 + endif
2089 endif
2090
2091 ifdef HAVE_PATHS_H
ci/lib.sh
+1
@@ -385,6 +385,7 @@ linux-musl)
385 ;;
386 linux-leaks|linux-reftable-leaks)
387 export SANITIZE=leak
388 + export THREAD_BARRIER_PTHREAD=1
389 ;;
390 linux-asan-ubsan)
391 export SANITIZE=address,undefined
thread-utils.h
+17
@@ -53,5 +53,22 @@ int dummy_pthread_init(void *);
53 int online_cpus(void);
54 int init_recursive_mutex(pthread_mutex_t*);
55
56 +#ifdef THREAD_BARRIER_PTHREAD
57 +#define maybe_thread_barrier_t pthread_barrier_t
58 +#define maybe_thread_barrier_init pthread_barrier_init
59 +#define maybe_thread_barrier_wait pthread_barrier_wait
60 +#define maybe_thread_barrier_destroy pthread_barrier_destroy
61 +#else
62 +#define maybe_thread_barrier_t int
63 +static inline int maybe_thread_barrier_init(maybe_thread_barrier_t *b UNUSED,
64 + void *attr UNUSED,
65 + unsigned nr UNUSED)
66 +{
67 + errno = ENOSYS;
68 + return -1;
69 +}
70 +#define maybe_thread_barrier_wait(barrier)
71 +#define maybe_thread_barrier_destroy(barrier)
72 +#endif
73
74 #endif /* THREAD_COMPAT_H */