Josef “Jeff” Sipek

CPU Pause Threads

Recently, I ended up debugging a boot hang. (I’m still working on it, so I don’t have a resolution to it yet.) The hang seems to occur during the mp startup. That is, when the boot CPU tries to online all the other CPUs on the system. As a result, I spent a fair amount of time reading the code and poking around with mdb. Given the effort I put in, I decided to document my understanding of how CPUs get brought online during boot in Illumos. In this post, I’ll talk about the CPU pause threads.

Each CPU has a special thread — the pause thread. It is a very high priority thread that’s supposed to preempt everything on the CPU. If all CPUs are executing this high-priority thread, then we know for fact that nothing can possibly be dereferencing the CPU structures’ (cpu_t) pointers. Why is this useful? Here’s a comment from right above cpu_pause — the function pause threads execute:

/*
 * This routine is called to place the CPUs in a safe place so that
 * one of them can be taken off line or placed on line.  What we are
 * trying to do here is prevent a thread from traversing the list
 * of active CPUs while we are changing it or from getting placed on
 * the run queue of a CPU that has just gone off line.  We do this by
 * creating a thread with the highest possible prio for each CPU and
 * having it call this routine.  The advantage of this method is that
 * we can eliminate all checks for CPU_ACTIVE in the disp routines.
 * This makes disp faster at the expense of making p_online() slower
 * which is a good trade off.
 */

The pause thread is pointed to by the CPU structure’s cpu_pause_thread member. A new CPU does not have a pause thread until after it has been added to the list of existing CPUs. (cpu_pause_alloc does the actual allocation.)

CPU pausing is pretty strange. First of all, let’s call the CPU requesting other CPUs to pause the controlling CPU and all online CPUs that will pause the pausing CPUs. (The controlling CPU does not pause itself.) Second, there are two global structures: (1) a global array called safe_list which contains a 8-bit integer for each possible CPU where each element holds a value ranging from 0 to 4 (PAUSE_*) denoting the state of that CPU’s pause thread, and (2) cpu_pause_info which contains some additional goodies used for synchronization.

Pausing

To pause CPUs, the controlling CPU calls pause_cpus (which uses cpu_pause_start), where it iterates over all the pausing CPUs setting their safe_list entries to PAUSE_IDLE and queueing up (using setbackdq) their pause threads.

Now, just because the pause threads got queued doesn’t mean that they’ll get to execute immediately. That is why the controlling CPU then waits for each of the pause threads to up a semaphore in the cpu_pause_info structure. Once all the pause threads have upped the semaphore, the controlling CPU sets the cp_go flag to let the pause threads know that it’s time for them to go to sleep. Then the controlling CPU waits for each pause thread to signal (via the safe_list) that they have disabled just about all interrupts and that they are spinning (mach_cpu_pause). At this point, pause_cpus knows that all online CPUs are in a safe place.

Starting

Starting the CPUs back up is pretty easy. The controlling CPU just needs to set all the CPU’s safe_list to a PAUSE_IDLE. That will cause the pausing CPUs to break out of their spin-loop. Once out of the spin loop, interrupts are re-enabled and a CPU control relinquished (via swtch). The controlling CPU does some cleanup of its own, but that’s all that is to it.

Synchronization

Why not use a mutex or semaphore for everything? The problem lies in the fact that we are in a really fragile state. We don’t want to lose the CPU because we blocked on a semaphore. That’s why this code uses a custom synchronization primitives.

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