The HelenOS operating system is designed to make use of the parallelism offered by the hardware and to exploit concurrency of both the kernel and userspace tasks. This is achieved through multiprocessor support and several levels of multiprogramming such as multitasking, multithreading and also through userspace pseudo threads. However, such a highly concurrent environment needs safe and efficient ways to handle mutual exclusion and synchronization of many execution flows.

The basic mutual exclusion primitive is the spinlock. The spinlock implements active waiting for the availability of a memory lock (i.e. simple variable) in a multiprocessor-safe manner. This safety is achieved through the use of a specialized, architecture-dependent, atomic test-and-set operation which either locks the spinlock (i.e. sets the variable) or, provided that it is already locked, leaves it unaltered. In any case, the test-and-set operation returns a value, thus signalling either success (i.e. zero return value) or failure (i.e. non-zero value) in acquiring the lock. Note that this makes a fundamental difference between the naive algorithm that doesn't use the atomic operation and the spinlock algortihm. While the naive algorithm is prone to race conditions on SMP configurations and thus is completely SMP-unsafe, the spinlock algorithm eliminates the possibility of race conditions and is suitable for mutual exclusion use. The semantics of the test-and-set operation is that the spinlock remains unavailable until this operation called on the respective spinlock returns zero. HelenOS builds two functions on top of the test-and-set operation. The first function is the unconditional attempt to acquire the spinlock and is called spinlock_lock. It simply loops until the test-and-set returns a zero value. The other function, spinlock_trylock, is the conditional lock operation and calls the test-and-set only once to find out whether it managed to acquire the spinlock or not. The conditional operation is useful in situations in which an algorithm cannot acquire more spinlocks in the proper order and a deadlock cannot be avoided. In such a case, the algorithm would detect the danger and instead of possibly deadlocking the system it would simply release some spinlocks it already holds and retry the whole operation with the hope that it will succeed next time. The unlock function, spinlock_unlock, is quite easy - it merely clears the spinlock variable. Nevertheless, there is a special issue related to hardware optimizations that modern processors implement. Particularly problematic is the out-of-order execution of instructions within the critical section protected by a spinlock. The processors are always self-consistent so that they can carry out speculatively executed instructions in the right order with regard to dependencies among those instructions. However, the dependency between instructions inside the critical section and those that implement locking and unlocking of the respective spinlock is not implicit on some processor architectures. As a result, the processor needs to be explicitly told about each occurrence of such a dependency. Therefore, HelenOS adds architecture-specific hooks to all spinlock_lock, spinlock_trylock and spinlock_unlock functions to prevent the instructions inside the critical section from permeating out. On some architectures, these hooks can be void because the dependencies are implicitly there because of the special properties of locking and unlocking instructions. However, other architectures need to instrument these hooks with different memory barriers, depending on what operations could permeate out. Spinlocks have one significant drawback: when held for longer time periods, they harm both parallelism and concurrency. The processor executing spinlock_lock does not do any fruitful work and is effectively halted until it can grab the lock and proceed. Similarily, other execution flows cannot execute on the processor that holds the spinlock because the kernel disables preemption on that processor when a spinlock is held. The reason behind disabling preemption is priority inversion problem avoidance. For the same reason, threads are strongly discouraged from sleeping when they hold a spinlock. To summarize, spinlocks represent very simple and essential mutual exclusion primitive for SMP systems. On the other hand, spinlocks scale poorly because of the active loop they are based on. Therefore, spinlocks are used in HelenOS only for short-time mutual exclusion and in cases where the mutual exclusion is required out of thread context. Lastly, spinlocks are used in the construction of passive synchronization primitives.

A wait queue is the basic passive synchronization primitive on which all other passive synchronization primitives are built. Simply put, it allows a thread to sleep until an event associated with the particular wait queue occurs. Multiple threads are notified about incoming events in a first come, first served fashion. Moreover, should the event come before any thread waits for it, it is recorded in the wait queue as a missed wakeup and later forwarded to the first thread that decides to wait in the queue. The inner structures of the wait queue are protected by a spinlock. The thread that wants to wait for a wait queue event uses the waitq_sleep_timeout function. The algorithm then checks the wait queue's counter of missed wakeups and if there are any missed wakeups, the call returns immediately. The call also returns immediately if only a conditional wait was requested. Otherwise the thread is enqueued in the wait queue's list of sleeping threads and its state is changed to Sleeping. It then sleeps until one of the following events happens: another thread calls waitq_wakeup and the thread is the first thread in the wait queue's list of sleeping threads; another thread calls waitq_interrupt_sleep on the sleeping thread; the sleep times out provided that none of the previous occurred within a specified time limit; the limit can be infinity. All five possibilities (immediate return on success, immediate return on failure, wakeup after sleep, interruption and timeout) are distinguishable by the return value of waitq_sleep_timeout. Being able to interrupt a sleeping thread is essential for externally initiated thread termination. The ability to wait only for a certain amount of time is used, for instance, to passively delay thread execution by several microseconds or even seconds in thread_sleep function. Due to the fact that all other passive kernel synchronization primitives are based on wait queues, they also have the option of being interrutped and, more importantly, can timeout. All of them also implement the conditional operation. Furthemore, this very fundamental interface reaches up to the implementation of futexes - userspace synchronization primitive, which makes it possible for a userspace thread to request a synchronization operation with a timeout or a conditional operation. From the description above, it should be apparent, that when a sleeping thread is woken by waitq_wakeup or when waitq_sleep_timeout succeeds immediately, the thread can be sure that the event has occurred. The thread need not and should not verify this fact. This approach is called direct hand-off and is characteristic for all passive HelenOS synchronization primitives, with the exception as described below.

The interesting point about wait queues is that the number of missed wakeups is equal to the number of threads that will not block in watiq_sleep_timeout and would immediately succeed instead. On the other hand, semaphores are synchronization primitives that will let predefined amount of threads into its critical section and block any other threads above this count. However, these two cases are exactly the same. Semaphores in HelenOS are therefore implemented as wait queues with a single semantic change: their wait queue is initialized to have so many missed wakeups as is the number of threads that the semphore intends to let into its critical section simultaneously. In the semaphore language, the wait queue operation waitq_sleep_timeout corresponds to semaphore down operation, represented by the function semaphore_down_timeout and by way of similitude the wait queue operation waitq_wakeup corresponds to semaphore up operation, represented by the function sempafore_up. The conditional down operation is called semaphore_trydown.

Mutexes are sometimes referred to as binary sempahores. That means that mutexes are like semaphores that allow only one thread in its critical section. Indeed, mutexes in HelenOS are implemented exactly in this way: they are built on top of semaphores. From another point of view, they can be viewed as spinlocks without busy waiting. Their semaphore heritage provides good basics for both conditional operation and operation with timeout. The locking operation is called mutex_lock, the conditional locking operation is called mutex_trylock and the unlocking operation is called mutex_unlock.

Reader/writer locks, or rwlocks, are by far the most complicated synchronization primitive within the kernel. The goal of these locks is to improve concurrency of applications, in which threads need to synchronize access to a shared resource, and that access can be partitioned into a read-only mode and a write mode. Reader/writer locks should make it possible for several, possibly many, readers to enter the critical section, provided that no writer is currently in the critical section, or to be in the critical section contemporarily. Writers are allowed to enter the critical section only individually, provided that no reader is in the critical section already. Applications, in which the majority of operations can be done in the read-only mode, can benefit from increased concurrency created by reader/writer locks. During reader/writer lock construction, a decision should be made whether readers will be prefered over writers or whether writers will be prefered over readers in cases when the lock is not currently held and both a reader and a writer want to gain the lock. Some operating systems prefer one group over the other, creating thus a possibility for starving the unprefered group. In the HelenOS operating system, none of the two groups is prefered. The lock is granted on a first come, first served basis with the additional note that readers are granted the lock in the biggest possible batch. With this policy and the timeout modes of operation, the direct hand-off becomes much more complicated. For instance, a writer leaving the critical section must wake up all leading readers in the rwlock's wait queue or one leading writer or no-one if no thread is waiting. Similarily, the last reader leaving the critical section must wakeup the sleeping writer if there are any sleeping threads left at all. As another example, if a writer at the beginning of the rwlock's wait queue times out and the lock is held by at least one reader, the writer which has timed out must first wake up all readers that follow him in the queue prior to signalling the timeout itself and giving up. Due to the issues mentioned in the previous paragraph, the reader/writer lock imlpementation needs to walk the rwlock wait queue's list of sleeping threads directly, in order to find out the type of access that the queueing threads demand. This makes the code difficult to understand and dependent on the internal implementation of the wait queue. Nevertheless, it remains unclear to the authors of HelenOS whether a simpler but equivalently fair solution exists. The implementation of rwlocks as it has been already put, makes use of one single wait queue for both readers and writers, thus avoiding any possibility of starvation. In fact, rwlocks use a mutex rather than a bare wait queue. This mutex is called exclusive and is used to synchronize writers. The writer's lock operation, rwlock_write_lock_timeout, simply tries to acquire the exclusive mutex. If it succeeds, the writer is granted the rwlock. However, if the operation fails (e.g. times out), the writer must check for potential readers at the head of the list of sleeping threads associated with the mutex's wait queue and then proceed according to the procedure outlined above. The exclusive mutex plays an important role in reader synchronization as well. However, a reader doing the reader's lock operation, rwlock_read_lock_timeout, may bypass this mutex when it detects that: there are other readers in the critical section and there are no sleeping threads waiting for the exclusive mutex. If both conditions are true, the reader will bypass the mutex, increment the number of readers in the critical section and then enter the critical section. Note that if there are any sleeping threads at the beginning of the wait queue, the first must be a writer. If the conditions are not fulfilled, the reader normally waits until the exclusive mutex is granted to it.

Condvars explanation