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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Why is .NET using spinlocks in user space, anyway? That's usually a kernel technique, where you can't yield to another thread.

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Userland has spinlocks quite often. The thing you're locking is often soon unlocked. It's not worth the time to reschedule.

Futex-based spinlocks do what, 1000 spin cycles before actually futex(2)ing?

This only makes sense for prioritizing the performance of individual processes, not scheduling a system of cooperating processes.

I don't think that's true. Losing a few cycles instead of calling a syscall can be beneficial to the system as a whole.

> The thing you're locking is often soon unlocked.

If the holder of the lock got preempted you could be spinning for a very long time.

This is why spinlocks don't spin forever; they will break out of the spinloop and do a full-fledged OS-level lock acquisition, which will deschedule the thread.

You still have the problem if your spinlock gets preempted while spinning. You really should only use a spinlock if you can disable preemption, which is usually limited to the kernel or realtime processes.

It's no worse than being preempted anywhere else, as long as your spin sequence doesn't preclude other threads from acquiring that lock when it is released; in fact it is often better. If you are preempted while spinning to acquire a lock then that is working as intended (WAI), because you yield the CPU to runnable work, instead of burning it.

> You really should only use a spinlock if you can disable preemption, which is usually limited to the kernel or realtime processes.

Oh god, no, don't do that. Then you could livelock if you don't do a hybrid strategy, because you are totally hosed if all your cores enter the unpreemptable spin sequence.

Maybe you are thinking of a different scenario, where the thread is preempted in the spinloop, but the kernel thinks it is runnable and at some future time just reschedules it, and it then continues to spin. That can happen, but the thread should break out of its spinloop and block anyway if the spinlock is tuned properly, so at most you just broke up the spinning across reschedules, and haven't fundamentally made anything worse. In an ideal world, if the kernel preempts a thread in a spinloop, it should transition it directly into the waiting state, and not reschedule it until it can acquire the lock. But since spinloops are in userspace, the kernel usually has no idea what is going on.

You're right that pure spinlocks are usually a bad approach in usermode. Most implementations use a hybrid approach, where you spin for a short while, on the assumption that another core holds the lock for only a short while, before you switch to blocking the thread.

You might want to read https://webkit.org/blog/6161/locking-in-webkit/ about how Chrome implements high performance locks.

Safari, not Chrome.

I think that code ships for all WebKit-based browsers (though not Chrome).

Doesn't Chrome use Blink, a fork of Webkit?

It does, but it forked long before that blog post was written.

With thanks in part to the security community and part to Intel, the budget that can be spent avoiding a syscall just keeps increasing every year

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