9. Threads

9.1. Thread safety

The MPS is designed to run in an environment with multiple threads all calling into the MPS. Some code is known to operate with exclusive access to the data it manipulates (for example, allocation via allocation points, in the common case where the buffer does not need to be refilled, and location dependencies), so this code is safe. For the rest of the code, shared data structures are locked by the use of a single lock per arena. This lock is claimed on entry to the MPS and released on exit from it. So there is at most a single thread (per arena) running “inside” the MPS at a time.

9.2. Thread registration

In order to scan a thread’s registers for references (which happens at each flip), the MPS needs to be able to suspend that thread, and in order to gain exclusive atomic access to memory in order to scan it, the MPS needs to be able to suspend all threads that might access that memory. This means that threads must be registered with the MPS by calling mps_thread_reg() (and thread roots created; see Thread roots).

For simplicity, we recommend that a thread must be registered with an arena if:

However, some automatically managed pool classes may be more liberal than this. See the documentation for the pool class.

9.3. Signal and exception handling issues

Warning

On Unix platforms (except OS X), the MPS suspends and resumes threads by sending them signals. There’s a shortage of available signals that aren’t already dedicated to other purposes (for example, ValGrind uses SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2), so the MPS uses SIGXCPU and SIGXFSZ. This means that programs must not mask these two signals.

If your program needs to handle these signals, then it must co-operate with the MPS. At present, there’s no documented mechanism for co-operating: if you are in this situation, please contact us.

Warning

The MPS uses barriers (1) to protect memory from the client program and handles the signals that result from barrier hits.

  • On Linux and FreeBSD, your program must not mask or handle SIGSEGV.

  • On Windows, you must not install a first-chance exception handler.

  • On OS X, you must not install a thread-local Mach exception handler for EXC_BAD_ACCESS exceptions.

All of these things are, in fact, possible, but your program must co-operate with the MPS. At present, there’s no documented mechanism for co-operating: if you are in this situation, please contact us.

9.4. Thread interface

mps_thr_t

The type of registered thread descriptions.

In a multi-threaded environment where incremental garbage collection is used, threads must be registered with the MPS by calling mps_thread_reg() so that the MPS can suspend them as necessary in order to have exclusive access to their state.

Even in a single-threaded environment it may be necessary to register a thread with the MPS so that its control stack and registers can be registered as a root by calling mps_root_create_thread().

mps_res_t mps_thread_reg(mps_thr_t *thr_o, mps_arena_t arena)

Register the current thread with an arena.

thr_o points to a location that will hold the address of the registered thread description, if successful.

arena is the arena.

Returns MPS_RES_OK if successful, or another result code if not.

A thread must be registered with an arena if it ever uses a pointer to a location in an automatically managed pool belonging to that arena.

Note

It is recommended that all threads be registered with all arenas.

It is an error if a thread terminates while it is registered. The client program must call mps_thread_dereg() first.

void mps_thread_dereg(mps_thr_t thr)

Deregister a thread.

thr is the description of the thread.

After calling this function, the thread whose registration with an arena was recorded in thr must not read or write from a location in an automatically managed pool belonging to that arena.

Note

Some pool classes may be more liberal about what a thread may do after it has been deregistered. See the documentation for the pool class.

Note

It is recommended that threads be deregistered only when they are just about to exit.