diary at Telent Netowrks

I was going to write something here to describe the recent GC#

Fri, 22 Aug 2003 03:15:04 +0000

I was going to write something here to describe the recent GC rearrangement work. But then I spent a long time on a mail to sbcl-devel explaining it all anyway. So then I was going to put a pointer here to the list archive. But then it didn't show up in the list archive, probably due to mail servers everywhere being hammered by windows viruses and their associated bounce messages. So I may as well cut and paste, just to have something in the diary. If you read sbcl-devel, you'll (eventually) get this twice. Sorry about that.

The stop-theworldbranch is ready for wider testing (anoncvs users,
please be sure you have the latest; version.lisp-expr is
"0.8.2.38.stoptheworld.7").  It's too big a change for 0.8.3
release, but will probably be merged early in the 0.8.4 cycle.
If you have any application that uses threads, please download it and
give it a go, and report progress or lack thereof.  If you have any
kind of single-threaded SBCL, I may well have broken that in the
process : if you feel like sorting out the wreckage and
sending/committing patches, that will be a help.
What it does:
1) move from ptrace() to signals for stopping threads at GC time.
This probably makes it easier to port to other systems - except that
we're using a couple of Posix RT signals, which FleaBSD apparently
doesn't have, but I'm sure that can be worked around somehow - and
also means that you can attach strace to sbcl threads without them
dying horribly due to ptrace reparenting larks.  Thanks to Gary Byers
for pointing out (some time ago) this way of doing things.  I think he
said he got it from the Boehm collector.
2) clean up (or at any rate, rewrite to be differently messy) a pile
of stuff in the signal handling.  Sometimes this was just adding
commentary, but also I think the new functions maybedeferhandler and
rundeferredhandler make it a lot easier to write signal handlers
which obey the pseudo-atomic rules - and to know that they're
uniformly obeyed in the existing handlers that profess to observe
them, of course.  This also fixes a signal-safety bug in
interrupt-thread (which, sadly, 0.8.3 will ship with, but
interrupt-thread didn't exist at all in 0.8.2, so if there are any
threads users who are insufficiently bleeding edge to be able to
compile their own CVS versions, they probably won't miss what they
never had)
3) I wrote last week about return-elsewhere (the new arrangement for
calling Lisp code as a result of signals being handled: see previous
message at http://article.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.steel-bank.devel/1737 )
but I don't think I announced that it was working.  It is (though 
it's only used for interrupt-thread and control stack exhausion).
Most of this was done on HEAD before the branch, but if you're going
to hack around with C-level signals stuff I suggest you look at the
branched code anyway because the new _defer functions make it easier
to get right.  If they're right, at least.  Otherwise they make it
easier to blame incorrect operation on me; granted that's a poor
second best, but it preserves your honour at least.
4) move from a dedicated thread for GC which runs no lisp code, to a
system where any thread can collect garbage.  The immediate advantage
is that we now have a thread-safe way of running hooks before/after
GC, and the most often asked-for hook is something to run GC
finalisers.
I haven't actually implemented anything to call said hooks yet.  It
should be a couple of lines of code, but I thought I'd ask first:
a) there are a couple of hook lists for before/after gc in the system
already.  Functions on these lists take no arguments and return
nothing interesting
b) CMUCL also has notifiers (or something: I'm going on memory and
it's been a while):  these get arguments for the amount of time/memory
spent/saved/wasted/until next gc, etc.  
I'm inclined to unify hooks and notifiers in SBCL, retaining the
zero-argument hook signature, and shove any interesting-looking kind
of gc statistics into special variables where calleds could either get
them or ignore them at their leisure.  Comments?

:; cvs status version.lisp-expr
===================================================================
File: version.lisp-expr Status: Up-to-date
   Working revision:    1.1167.2.6
   Repository revision: 1.1167.2.6      /cvsroot/sbcl/sbcl/version.lisp-expr,v
   Sticky Tag:          stoptheworld_branch (branch: 1.1167.2)
   Sticky Date:         (none)
   Sticky Options:      (none)
:; tail -1 version.lisp-expr
"0.8.2.38.stoptheworld.7"

Enjoy