Lock Versus Lock-Free..
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All on Thu Jun 11 20:45:16 2020
Hello...
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Lock Versus Lock-Free..
The class of problems that can be solved by lock-free approaches is limited.
Furthermore, lock-free approaches can require restructuring a problem.
As soon as multiple shared data-structures are modified
simultaneously,the only practical approach is to use a lock.
All lock-free dynamic-size data-structures using such CAA
(Compare-and-assign) require some form of garbage collector to lazily
delete storage when it is no longer referenced. In languages with
garbage collection, this capability comes for free (at the cost of
garbage collection). For languages without garbage collection, the code
is complex and error prone in comparison with locks, requiring
epoch-based reclamation, read-copy-update (RCU), or hazard pointers.
While better performance is claimed for lock-free data-structures, there
is no long-term evidence to support this claim. Many high-performance
locking situations, e.g., operating system kernels and databases,
continue to use locking in various forms, even though there are a broad
class of lock-free data-structure readily available.
While lock-free data-structures cannot have deadlock, there is seldom
deadlock using locks for the simple class of problems solvable using
lock-free approaches. For example, protecting basic data-structure
operations with locks is usually very straightforward. Normally deadlock
occurs when accessing multiple resources simultaneously, which is not a
class of problems dealt with by lock-free approaches. Furthermore,
disciplined lock usage, such as ranking locks to avoid deadlock, works
well in practice and is not onerous for the programmer.Finally, some
static analysis tools are helpful for detecting deadlock scenarios.
Lock-free approaches have thread-kill tolerance, meaning no thread owns
a lock, so any thread can terminate at an arbitrary point without
leaving a lock in the closed state. However, within an application,
thread kill is an unusual operation and thread failure means an
unrecoverable error or major reset.
A lock-free approach always allows progress of other threads, whereas
locks can cause delays if the lock owner is preempted. However,this
issue is a foundational aspect of preemptive concurrency. And there are
ways to mitigate this issue for locks using scheduler-activation
techniques. However, lock-free is not immune to delays. If a page is
evicted containing part of the lock-based or lockfree data, there is a
delay. Hence, lock free is no better than lock based if the page
fault occurs on frequently accessed shared data. Given the increasing
number of processors and large amount of memory on modern computers,
neither of these delays should occur often.
Lock-free approaches are reentrant, and hence, can be used in signal
handlers, which are implicitly concurrent. Locking approaches cannot
deal with this issue. Lock-free approaches are claimed not to have
priority inversion. However, inversion can occur because of the spinning required with atomic instructions, like CAA, as the hardware does not
provide a bound for spinning threads. Hence, a low-priority thread can
barge head of a high-priority thread because the low-priority thread
just happens to win the race at the CAA instruction. Essentially,
priority inversion is a foundational aspect of preemptive concurrency
and can only be mitigated.
The conclusion is that for unmanaged programming language (i.e., no
garbage collection), using classical locks is simple, efficient,
general, and causes issues only when the problem scales to multiple
locks. For managed programming-languages, lock-free data-structures are
easier to implement, but only handle a specific set of problems, and the programmer must accept other idiosyncrasies, like pauses in
execution for garbage collection.
Thank you,
Amine Moulay Ramdane.
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