parking_lot

Documentation

This library provides implementations of Mutex, RwLock, Condvar and Once that are smaller, faster and more flexible than those in the Rust standard library. It also exposes a low-level API for creating your own efficient synchronization primitives.

Features

The primitives provided by this library have several advantages over those in the Rust standard library:

1. Mutex, Condvar and Once only require 1 byte of storage space, and RwLock only requires 1 word of storage space. On the other hand the standard library primitives require a dynamically allocated Box to hold OS-specific synchronization primitives. The small size of Mutex in particular encourages the use of fine-grained locks to increase parallelism.
2. Since they consist of just a single atomic variable, have constant initializers and don't need destructors, these primitives can be used as static global variables. The standard library primitives require dynamic initialization and thus need to be lazily initialized with lazy_static!.
3. Uncontended lock acquisition and release is done through fast inline paths which only require a single atomic operation.
4. Microcontention (a contended lock with a short critical section) is efficiently handled by spinning a few times while trying to acquire a lock.
5. The locks are adaptive and will suspend a thread after a few failed spin attempts. This makes the locks suitable for both long and short critical sections.

The parking lot

To keep these primitives small, all thread queuing and suspending functionality is offloaded to the parking lot. The idea behind this is based on the Webkit [WTF::ParkingLot] (https://webkit.org/blog/6161/locking-in-webkit/) class, which essentially consists of a hash table mapping of lock addresses to queues of parked (sleeping) threads. The Webkit parking lot was itself inspired by Linux futexes, but it is more powerful since it allows invoking callbacks while holding a queue lock.

Parking refers to suspending the thread while simultaneously enqueuing it on a queue keyed by some address. Unparking refers to dequeuing a thread from a queue keyed by some address and resuming it. The parking lot API consists of just 3 functions:

rust,ignore unsafe fn park(key: usize, validate: &mut FnMut() -> bool, before_sleep: &mut FnMut(), timeout: Option<Instant>) -> bool

This function performs the following steps:

1. Lock the queue associated with key.
2. Call validate, if it returns false, unlock the queue and return.
3. Add the current thread to the queue.
4. Unlock the queue.
5. Call before_sleep.
6. Sleep until we are unparked or timeout is reached.
7. Return true if we were unparked by another thread, false otherwise.

rust,ignore unsafe fn unpark_one(key: usize, callback: &mut FnMut(UnparkResult)) -> UnparkResult

This function will unpark a single thread from the queue associated with key. The callback function is invoked while holding the queue lock but before the thread is unparked. The UnparkResult indicates whether the queue was empty and, if not, whether there are still threads remaining in the queue.

rust,ignore unsafe fn unpark_all(key: usize) -> usize

This function will unpark all threads in the queue associated with key. It returns the number of threads that were unparked.

Building custom synchronization primitives

Building custom synchronization primitives is very simple since parking_lot takes care of all the hard parts for you. The most commmon case for a custom primitive would be to integrate a Mutex inside another data type. Since a mutex only requires 2 bits, it can share space with other data. For example, one could create an ArcMutex type that combines the atomic reference count and the two mutex bits in the same atomic word.

Usage

This crate currently requires a nightly Rust compiler.

Add this to your Cargo.toml:

toml [dependencies] parking_lot = "0.1"

and this to your crate root:

rust extern crate parking_lot;

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.