Date:   Wed, 31 Jul 2019 18:02:25 -0500
From:   Zebediah Figura <z.figura12@...il.com>
To:     Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>
Cc:     Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
        Gabriel Krisman Bertazi <krisman@...labora.com>,
        mingo@...hat.com, dvhart@...radead.org,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, kernel@...labora.com,
        Steven Noonan <steven@...vesoftware.com>,
        "Pierre-Loup A . Griffais" <pgriffais@...vesoftware.com>,
        viro@...iv.linux.org.uk, jannh@...gle.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC 2/2] futex: Implement mechanism to wait on any of
 several futexes

On 7/31/19 5:39 PM, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Jul 2019, Zebediah Figura wrote:
>> On 7/31/19 7:06 AM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>>> On Tue, Jul 30, 2019 at 06:06:02PM -0400, Gabriel Krisman Bertazi wrote:
>>>> This is a new futex operation, called FUTEX_WAIT_MULTIPLE, which allows
>>>> a thread to wait on several futexes at the same time, and be awoken by
>>>> any of them.  In a sense, it implements one of the features that was
>>>> supported by pooling on the old FUTEX_FD interface.
>>>>
>>>> My use case for this operation lies in Wine, where we want to implement
>>>> a similar interface available in Windows, used mainly for event
>>>> handling.  The wine folks have an implementation that uses eventfd, but
>>>> it suffers from FD exhaustion (I was told they have application that go
>>>> to the order of multi-milion FDs), and higher CPU utilization.
>>>
>>> So is multi-million the range we expect for @count ?
>>>
>>
>> Not in Wine's case; in fact Wine has a hard limit of 64 synchronization
>> primitives that can be waited on at once (which, with the current user-side
>> code, translates into 65 futexes). The exhaustion just had to do with the
>> number of primitives created; some programs seem to leak them badly.
> 
> And how is the futex approach better suited to 'fix' resource leaks?
> 

The crucial constraints for implementing Windows synchronization 
primitives in Wine are that (a) it must be possible to access them from 
multiple processes and (b) it must be possible to wait on more than one 
at a time.

The current best solution for this, performance-wise, backs each Windows 
synchronization primitive with an eventfd(2) descriptor and uses poll(2) 
to select on them. Windows programs can create an apparently unbounded 
number of synchronization objects, though they can only wait on up to 64 
at a time. However, on Linux the NOFILE limit causes problems; some 
distributions have it as low as 4096 by default, which is too low even 
for some modern programs that don't leak objects.

The approach we are developing, that relies on this patch, backs each 
object with a single futex whose value represents its signaled state. 
Therefore the only resource we are at risk of running out of is 
available memory, which exists in far greater quantities than available 
descriptors. [Presumably Windows synchronization primitives require at 
least some kernel memory to be allocated per object as well, so this 
puts us essentially at parity, for whatever that's worth.]

To be clear, I think the primary impetus for developing the futex-based 
approach was performance; it lets us avoid some system calls in hot 
paths (e.g. waiting on an already signaled object, resetting the state 
of an object to unsignaled. In that respect we're trying to get ahead of 
Windows, I guess.) But we have still been encountering occasional grief 
due to NOFILE limits that are too low, so this is another helpful benefit.

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