Of course, there's no such thing in std, but I need equivalent functionality.
I have a lock-free data structure templated on a type T, where T is provided by the user, and what I need to statically assert is that T is a type that is atomically assignable on x86 or x86-64 (which includes all built-in integral constants and floating point types, and any typedef thereof, but I think is not necessarily limited to those). I'm guessing that merely checking that the type is trivially assignable and that its sizeof is <= 8 is not sufficient. What's the best way to do this? Forcing T to be an std::atomic<> and then checking is_lock_free() is out of the question.
"atomically assignable" is not sufficient condition for using a type to implement a lock-free data structure, so this idea is going down to the wrong path from the start.
Using std::atomic (and friends) is the only way in C++ to have both the atomicity and the ordering guarantees necessary to implement a lock-free data structure. Atomic assignment is useless if no other thread will ever see it.
Related
In C++20, we got the capability to sleep on atomic variables, waiting for their value to change.
We do so by using the std::atomic::wait method.
Unfortunately, while wait has been standardized, wait_for and wait_until are not. Meaning that we cannot sleep on an atomic variable with a timeout.
Sleeping on an atomic variable is anyway implemented behind the scenes with WaitOnAddress on Windows and the futex system call on Linux.
Working around the above problem (no way to sleep on an atomic variable with a timeout), I could pass the memory address of an std::atomic to WaitOnAddress on Windows and it will (kinda) work with no UB, as the function gets void* as a parameter, and it's valid to cast std::atomic<type> to void*
On Linux, it is unclear whether it's ok to mix std::atomic with futex. futex gets either a uint32_t* or a int32_t* (depending which manual you read), and casting std::atomic<u/int> to u/int* is UB. On the other hand, the manual says
The uaddr argument points to the futex word. On all platforms,
futexes are four-byte integers that must be aligned on a four-
byte boundary. The operation to perform on the futex is
specified in the futex_op argument; val is a value whose meaning
and purpose depends on futex_op.
Hinting that alignas(4) std::atomic<int> should work, and it doesn't matter which integer type is it is as long as the type has the size of 4 bytes and the alignment of 4.
Also, I have seen many places where this trick of combining atomics and futexes is implemented, including boost and TBB.
So what is the best way to sleep on an atomic variable with a timeout in a non UB way?
Do we have to implement our own atomic class with OS primitives to achieve it correctly?
(Solutions like mixing atomics and condition variables exist, but sub-optimal)
You shouldn't necessarily have to implement a full custom atomic API, it should actually be safe to simply pull out a pointer to the underlying data from the atomic<T> and pass it to the system.
Since std::atomic does not offer some equivalent of native_handle like other synchronization primitives offer, you're going to be stuck doing some implementation-specific hacks to try to get it to interface with the native API.
For the most part, it's reasonably safe to assume that first member of these types in implementations will be the same as the T type -- at least for integral values [1]. This is an assurance that will make it possible to extract out this value.
... and casting std::atomic<u/int> to u/int* is UB
This isn't actually the case.
std::atomic is guaranteed by the standard to be Standard-Layout Type. One helpful but often esoteric properties of standard layout types is that it is safe to reinterpret_cast a T to a value or reference of the first sub-object (e.g. the first member of the std::atomic).
As long as we can guarantee that the std::atomic<u/int> contains only the u/int as a member (or at least, as its first member), then it's completely safe to extract out the type in this manner:
auto* r = reinterpret_cast<std::uint32_t*>(&atomic);
// Pass to futex API...
This approach should also hold on windows to cast the atomic to the underlying type before passing it to the void* API.
Note: Passing a T* pointer to a void* that gets reinterpreted as a U* (such as an atomic<T>* to void* when it expects a T*) is undefined behavior -- even with standard-layout guarantees (as far as I'm aware). It will still likely work because the compiler can't see into the system APIs -- but that doesn't make the code well-formed.
Note 2: I can't speak on the WaitOnAddress API as I haven't actually used this -- but any atomics API that depends on the address of a properly aligned integral value (void* or otherwise) should work properly by extracting out a pointer to the underlying value.
[1] Since this is tagged C++20, you can verify this with std::is_layout_compatible with a static_assert:
static_assert(std::is_layout_compatible_v<int,std::atomic<int>>);
(Thanks to #apmccartney for this suggestion in the comments).
I can confirm that this will be layout compatible for Microsoft's STL, libc++, and libstdc++; however if you don't have access to is_layout_compatible and you're using a different system, you might want to check your compiler's headers to ensure this assumption holds.
You could use a "non-atomic" alignas(4) uint32_t variable with the futex calls, and perform other atomic operations on them via std::atomic_ref. See non-atomic operations on atomic variables and vice versa
I wrote some multithreaded but lock-free code that compiled and apparently executed fine on an earlier C++11-supporting GCC (7 or older). The atomic fields were ints and so on. To the best of my recollection, I used normal C/C++ operations to operate on them (a=1;, etc.) in places where atomicity or event ordering wasn't a concern.
Later I had to do some double-width CAS operations, and made a little struct with a pointer and counter as is common. I tried doing the same normal C/C++ operations, and errors came that the variable had no such members. (Which is what you'd expect from most normal templates, but I half-expected atomic to work differently, in part because normal assignments to and from were supported, to the best of my recollection, for ints.).
So two part question:
Should we use the atomic methods in all cases, even (say) initialization done by one thread with no race conditions? 1a) so once declared atomic there's no way to access unatomically? 1b) we also have to use the verboser verbosity of the atomic<> methods to do so?
Otherwise, if for integer types at least, we can use normal C/C++ operations. But in this case will those operations be the same as load()/store() or are they merely normal assignments?
And a semi-meta question: is there any insight as to why normal C/C++ operations aren't supported on atomic<> variables? I'm not sure if the C++11 language as spec'd has the power to write code that does that, but the spec can certainly require the compiler to do things the language as spec'd isn't powerful enough to do.
You're maybe looking for C++20 std::atomic_ref<T> to give you the ability to do atomic ops on objects that can also be accessed non-atomically. Make sure your non-atomic T object is declared with sufficient alignment for atomic<T>. e.g.
alignas(std::atomic_ref<long long>::required_alignment)
long long sometimes_shared_var;
But that requires C++20, and nothing equivalent is available in C++17 or earlier. Once an atomic object is constructed, I don't think there's any guaranteed portable safe way to modify it other than its atomic member functions.
Its internal object representation isn't guaranteed by the standard so memcpy to get the struct sixteenbyte object out of an atomic<sixteenbyte> efficiently isn't guaranteed by the standard to be safe even if no other thread has a reference to it. You'd have to know how a specific implementation stores it. Checking sizeof(atomic<T>) == sizeof(T) is a good sign, though, and mainstream implementations do in practice just have a T as the object-representation for atomic<T>.
Related: How can I implement ABA counter with c++11 CAS? for a nasty union hack ("safe" in GNU C++) to give efficient access to a single member, because compilers don't optimize foo.load().ptr to just atomically load that member. Instead GCC and clang will lock cmpxchg16b to load the whole pointer+counter pair, then just the first member. C++20 atomic_ref<> should solve that.
Accessing members of atomic<struct foo>: one reason for not allowing shared.x = tmp; is that it's the wrong mental model. If two different threads are storing to different members of the same struct, how does the language define any ordering for what other threads see? Plus it was probably considered too easy for programmer to design their lockless algorithms incorrectly if stuff like that were allowed.
Also, how would you even implement that? Return an lvalue-reference? It can't be to the underlying non-atomic object. And what if the code captures that reference and keeps using it long after calling some function that's not load or store?
Remember that ISO C++'s ordering model works in terms of synchronizes-with, not in terms of local reordering and a single cache-coherent domain like the way real ISAs define their memory models. The ISO C++ model is always strictly in terms of reading, writing, or RMWing the entire atomic object. So a load of the object can always sync-with any store of the whole object.
In hardware that would actually still work for a store to one member and a load from a different member if the whole object is in one cache line, on real-world ISAs. At least I think so, although possibly not on some SMT systems. (Being in one cache line is necessary for lock-free atomic access to the whole object to be possible on most ISAs.)
we also have to use the verboser verbosity of the atomic<> methods to do so?
The member functions of atomic<T> include overloads of all the operators, including operator= (store) and cast back to T (load). a = 1; is equivalent to a.store(1, std::memory_order_seq_cst) for atomic<int> a; and is the slowest way to set a new value.
Should we use the atomic methods in all cases, even (say) initialization done by one thread with no race conditions?
You don't have any choice, other than passing args to the constructors of std::atomic<T> objects.
You can use mo_relaxed loads / stores while your object is still thread-private, though. Avoid any RMW operators like +=. e.g. a.store(a.load(relaxed) + 1, relaxed); will compile about the same as for non-atomic objects of register-width or smaller.
(Except that it can't optimize away and keep the value in a register, so use local temporaries instead of actually updating the atomic object).
But for atomic objects too large to be lock-free, there's not really anything you can do efficiently except construct them with the right values in the first place.
The atomic fields were ints and so on. ...
and apparently executed fine
If you mean plain int, not atomic<int> then it wasn't portably safe.
Data-race UB doesn't guarantee visible breakage, the nasty thing with undefined behaviour is that happening to work in your test case is one of the things that's allowed to happen.
And in many cases with pure load or pure store, it won't break, especially on strongly ordered x86, unless the load or store can hoist or sink out of a loop. Why is integer assignment on a naturally aligned variable atomic on x86?. It'll eventually bite you when a compiler manages to do cross-file inlining and reorder some operations at compile time, though.
why normal C/C++ operations aren't supported on atomic<> variables?
... but the spec can certainly require the compiler to do things the language as spec'd isn't powerful enough to do.
This in fact was a limitation of C++11 through 17. Most compilers have no problem with it. For example implementation of the <atomic> header for gcc/clang's uses __atomic_ builtins which take a plain T* pointer.
The C++20 proposal for atomic_ref is p0019, which cites as motivation:
An object could be heavily used non-atomically in well-defined phases
of an application. Forcing such objects to be exclusively atomic would
incur an unnecessary performance penalty.
3.2. Atomic Operations on Members of a Very Large Array
High-performance computing (HPC) applications use very large arrays. Computations with these arrays typically have distinct phases that allocate and initialize members of the array, update members of the array, and read members of the array. Parallel algorithms for initialization (e.g., zero fill) have non-conflicting access when assigning member values. Parallel algorithms for updates have conflicting access to members which must be guarded by atomic operations. Parallel algorithms with read-only access require best-performing streaming read access, random read access, vectorization, or other guaranteed non-conflicting HPC pattern.
All of these things are a problem with std::atomic<>, confirming your suspicion that this is a problem for C++11.
Instead of introducing a way to do non-atomic access to std::atomic<T>, they introduced a way to do atomic access to a T object. One problem with this is that atomic<T> might need more alignment than a T would get by default, so be careful.
Unlike with giving atomic access to members of T, you could plausible have a .non_atomic() member function that returned an lvalue reference to the underlying object.
From C++ Concurrency in Action:
difference between std::atomic and std::atomic_flag is that std::atomic may not be lock-free; the implementation may have to acquire a mutex internally in order to ensure the atomicity of the operations
I wonder why. If atomic_flag is guaranteed to be lock-free, why isn't it guaranteed for atomic<bool> as well?
Is this because of the member function compare_exchange_weak? I know that some machines lack a single compare-and-exchange instruction, is that the reason?
First of all, you are perfectly allowed to have something like std::atomic<very_nontrivial_large_structure>, so std::atomic as such cannot generally be guaranteed to be lock-free (although most specializations for trivial types like bool or int probably could, on most systems). But that is somewhat unrelated.
The exact reasoning why atomic_flag and nothing else must be lock-free is given in the Note in N2427/29.3:
Hence the operations must be address-free. No other type requires lock-free operations, and hence the atomic_flag type is the minimum hardware-implemented type needed to conform to this standard. The remaining types can be emulated with atomic_flag, though with less than ideal properties.
In other words, it's the minimum thing that must be guaranteed on every platform, so it's possible to implement the standard correctly.
The standard does not garantee atomic objects are lock-free. On a platform that doesn't provide lock-free atomic operations for a type T, std::atomic<T> objects may be implemented using a mutex, which wouldn't be lock-free. In that case, any containers using these objects in their implementation would not be lock-free either.
The standard provide an opportunity to check if an std::atomic<T> variable is lock-free: you can use var.is_lock_free() or atomic_is_lock_free(&var). For basic types such as int, there is also macros provided (e.g. ATOMIC_INT_LOCK_FREE) which specify if lock-free atomic access to that type is available.
std::atomic_flag is an atomic boolean type. Almost always for boolean type it's not needed to use mutex or another way for synchronization.
From C++ Concurrency in Action:
difference between std::atomic and std::atomic_flag is that std::atomic may not be lock-free; the implementation may have to acquire a mutex internally in order to ensure the atomicity of the operations
I wonder why. If atomic_flag is guaranteed to be lock-free, why isn't it guaranteed for atomic<bool> as well?
Is this because of the member function compare_exchange_weak? I know that some machines lack a single compare-and-exchange instruction, is that the reason?
First of all, you are perfectly allowed to have something like std::atomic<very_nontrivial_large_structure>, so std::atomic as such cannot generally be guaranteed to be lock-free (although most specializations for trivial types like bool or int probably could, on most systems). But that is somewhat unrelated.
The exact reasoning why atomic_flag and nothing else must be lock-free is given in the Note in N2427/29.3:
Hence the operations must be address-free. No other type requires lock-free operations, and hence the atomic_flag type is the minimum hardware-implemented type needed to conform to this standard. The remaining types can be emulated with atomic_flag, though with less than ideal properties.
In other words, it's the minimum thing that must be guaranteed on every platform, so it's possible to implement the standard correctly.
The standard does not garantee atomic objects are lock-free. On a platform that doesn't provide lock-free atomic operations for a type T, std::atomic<T> objects may be implemented using a mutex, which wouldn't be lock-free. In that case, any containers using these objects in their implementation would not be lock-free either.
The standard provide an opportunity to check if an std::atomic<T> variable is lock-free: you can use var.is_lock_free() or atomic_is_lock_free(&var). For basic types such as int, there is also macros provided (e.g. ATOMIC_INT_LOCK_FREE) which specify if lock-free atomic access to that type is available.
std::atomic_flag is an atomic boolean type. Almost always for boolean type it's not needed to use mutex or another way for synchronization.
Reading the docs on boost::atomic and on std::atomic leaves me confused as to whether the atomic interface is supposed to support non-trivial types?
That is, given a (value-)type that can only be written/read by enclosing the read/write in a full mutex, because it has a non-trivial copy-ctor/assignment operator, is this supposed to be supported by std::atomic (as boost clearly states that it is UB).
Am I supposed to provide the specialization the docs talk about myself for non-trivial types?
Note: I was hitting on this because I have a cross-thread callback object boost::function<bool (void)> simpleFn; that needs to be set/reset atomically. Having a separate mutex / critical section or even wrapping both in a atomic-like helper type with simple set and get seem easy enough, but is there anything out of the box?
Arne's answer already points out that the Standard requires trivially copyable types for std::atomic.
Here's some rationale why atomics might not be the right tool for your problem in the first place: Atomics are the fundamental building primitives for building thread-safe data structures in C++. They are supposed to be the lowest-level building blocks for constructing more powerful data structures like thread-safe containers.
In particular, atomics are usually used for building lock-free data structures. For locking data structures primitives like std::mutex and std::condition_variable are a way better match, if only for the fact that it is very hard to write blocking code with atomics without introducing lots of busy waiting.
So when you think of std::atomic the first association should be lock-free (despite the fact that most of the atomic types are technically allowed to have blocking implementations). What you describe is a simple lock-based concurrent data structure, so wrapping it in an atomic should already feel wrong from a conceptual point of view.
Unfortunately, it is currently not clear how to express in the language that a data structure is thread-safe (which I guess was your primary intent for using atomic in the first place). Herb Sutter had some interesting ideas on this issue, but I guess for now we simply have to accept the fact that we have to rely on documentation to communicate how certain data structures behave with regards to thread-safety.
The standard specifies (ยง29.5,1) that
The type of the template argument T shall be trivially copyable
Meaning no, you cannot use types with non-trivial copy-ctor or assignment-op.
However, like with any template in namespace std, you are free to specialize the template for any type that it has not been specialized for by the implementation. So if you really want to use std::atomic<MyNonTriviallyCopyableType>, you have to provide the specialization yourself. How that specialization behaves is up to you, meaning, you are free to blow off your leg or the leg of anyone using that specialization, because it's just outside the scope of the standard.