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FreeBSD SMP Project

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Project Goal

The FreeBSD Symmetric MultiProcessing (SMP) project, often referred to as SMPng (SMP next generation), is focused on introducing parallelism into the FreeBSD kernel. While earlier versions of FreeBSD (3.x, 4.x) supported parallelism in user processes, the kernel was limited to executing on a single processor at a time, using what is referred to as a "Giant lock" around the kernel. For many interesting workloads, this results in a substantial speed-up, as significant computation occurs in user processes, especially for applications such as rendering and compilation. However, for kernel-intensive applications, such as intensive network or file system I/O, contention on the kernel lock results in little speed-up. The end goal of the SMPng Project is to decompose the Giant lock into a number of smaller locks, resulting in reduced contention (and improved SMP performance). However, important steps along the way include redesigning significant portions of the FreeBSD kernel architecture around the notion of ubiquitous parallelism: that at any moment, many processors might enter the kernel at the same time. This includes the introduction of more mature threading and synchronization primitives, interrupt threads, cache-aware allocation and scheduling, and topology-aware scheduling.

SMPng debuted in FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE in January of 2003, and involved over five years of continuous development by a large number of members of the FreeBSD development team, as well as many external contributors. Since 5.0, the implementation has substantially matured; in the 5.0 release, the basic architectural changes required to support SMPng were complete, including new kernel memory allocators, synchronization routines, the move to ithreads, and the removal of the Giant lock from activities such as process scheduling and several common forms of IPC. Since 5.0, the architecture has been refined in a number of ways, including optimizing synchronization approaches, stability and performance testing on larger systems (up to 12 processors), and the removal of Giant from several significant parts of the operating system, including large parts of Virtual Memory (VM), the Virtual File System (VFS), UNIX File System (UFS), most parts of the network stack, including IPv4, IPV6, FAST_IPSEC, UNIX domain sockets, and NetGraph, and also from additional inter-process communication primitives. The SMP-aware kernel slab allocator is now used almost universally, and the focus has changed from "make it work", to "optimize it!". Simultaneous work on KSE 1:1 and M:N threading has also allowed applications to take advantage of new kernel parallelism. The FreeBSD 5.3 kernel introduced Giant-free network stack execution for most relevant code paths, and the FreeBSD 6.x kernel introduces MPSAFE VFS, as well as wide-spread performance optimization.

Continuing work on SMPng includes work sweeping up the "loose ends" that remain under Giant, such as parts of NFS, less widely used file systems such as NTFS, and less commonly used network stack components, such as SLIP. Another important focus is performance measurement and optimization, which build on and refine the SMPng architecture: the introduction of features such as the kernel trace facility (KTR), hardware performance monitor counters (hwpmc), lock profiling, and improved memory monitoring play important roles in this process. Other important debugging and testing facilities include WITNESS, a run-time kernel lock order verifier, and wide-spread use of lock assertions and run-time invariants testing.

The FreeBSD Project recognizes, in particular, the contributions of the BSD/OS development team, including architectural direction and suggestions, as well as for initial locking strategies for some system components, and source code for some of the starting primitives, not to mention BSDI's contributions in staffing and resources for early parts of this project.

Project Plan

This web page contains information relating to the SMPng effort; because of the large amount of work and rapid pace of development, it can fall a bit behind reality.

The task list below is not intended to be complete, but does represent a set of relevant and/or important components of the overall work. The "Responsible" field identifies a developer who has expressed willingness to be responsible for completing the identified task; this doesn't preclude others working on it, but suggests that coordination with the responsible party might be appropriate so as to avoid unnecessary duplication of work, and to maximize forward progress. If beginning work on a new area of substantial size, or one that appears unclaimed, it may be worth dropping an e-mail to the FreeBSD SMP mailing list to see if any progress has been made.

The definition of the date field varies depending on the status of a task. For completed tasks, it refers to the date completed or reported completed. For in-progress tasks, it refers to the date of the last update of the entry. For stalled tasks, it refers to the date that the task was declared stalled. For new tasks, it refers to the date the task was added to the list.

Locking down of individual device drivers is tracked at the busdma and SMPng driver conversion webpage.

Network stack locking information is available at Robert Watson's netperf web page and the FreeBSD.org Netperf web page. An SMP network performance cluster has also been created for the purposes of testing.

Tasks are sorted first by status, then by date.

Resources and Links

Subsystems and Staffing

This is an incomplete list of high-level kernel subsystems and current, active staff working on SMP architecture and stability.

Subsystem Status Last updated Staffing
Newbus In progress 5 October 2003 Warner Losh
VM In progress 4 October 2003 Alan L. Cox
Buffer cache In progress 4 October 2003 Jeff Roberson, Poul-Henning Kamp
VFS In progress 4 October 2003 Jeff Roberson
Processes and thread operations In progress 5 May 2003 John Baldwin
Scheduler Done 23 April 2004 John Baldwin, Jeff Roberson
GEOM Done 5 February 2003 Poul-Henning Kamp
File descriptors Done 5 February 2003 Alfred Perlstein, Seigo Tanimura Robert Watson
TTY subsystem In progress 24 July 2004 Poul-Henning Kamp
Pipe IPC Done 4 October 2003 Alfred Perlstein
Socket structures and system calls Done 25 November 2004 Sam Leffler, Robert Watson
KQueue Done 24 November 2004 John-Mark Gurney, Brian Feldman
IPv4 Done 23 April 2004 Jennifer Yang, Jeffrey Hsu, Sam Leffler, Robert Watson, George V. Neville-Neil
IPv6 In progress 01 July 2005 Robert Watson, George V. Neville-Neil
IPX/SPX Done 09 January 2005 Robert Watson
netatalk Done 02 February 2005 Robert Watson
Network stack infrastructure In progress 4 October 2003 Jeffrey Hsu, Sam Leffler, Robert Watson, Max Laier, Luigi Rizzo, Maurycy Pawlowski-Wieronski <maurycy@fouk.org>, Brooks Davis, Roman Kurakin
NFS Client In progress 23 April 2004  
NFS Server In progress 24 November 2004 Robert Watson

Tasks

Following is an incomplete list of general tasks.

Task Responsible Last updated Status
Convert the giant lock from spinning to blocking, add the scheduler lock, add per-CPU idle processes. Matt Dillon 25 June 2000 Done
Port the BSD/OS locking primitives (i386). Jake Burkholder 3 July 2000 Done
Implement heavy-weight interrupt threads (i386). Greg Lehey 3 August 2000 Done
Rewrite the low level interrupt code (i386 UP). Greg Lehey 3 August 2000 Done
Demonstrated reasonable stability (self-hosted buildworld) (i386 UP). -smp developers 12 August 2000 Done
Port the BSD/OS locking primitives (alpha). Doug Rabson 24 August 2000 Done
Stub out (disable) spl()s. Greg Lehey 30 August 2000 Done
Port the BSD/OS ktr code. Greg Lehey, John Baldwin 30 August 2000 Done
Rewrite the low level interrupt code (i386 SMP). John Baldwin 1 September 2000 Done
Demonstrated reasonable stability (self-hosted buildworld) (i386 SMP). -smp developers 6 September 2000 Done
Demonstrated reasonable stability (self-hosted buildworld) (alpha). -smp developers 6 September 2000 Done
Make malloc and friends thread-safe. Jason Evans 10 September 2000 Done
Implement msleep(), make tsleep() an msleep() wrapper. Jake Burkholder 11 September 2000 Done
Make fxp driver thread-safe. Chuck Paterson 17 September 2000 Done
Make mbuf's thread-safe. Bosko Milekic 29 September 2000 Done
Lock manager re-work. Jason Evans 3 October 2000 Done
Implement heavy-weight interrupt threads (alpha). John Baldwin, Doug Rabson 5 October 2000 Done
Rewrite the low level interrupt code (alpha). Doug Rabson, John Baldwin 5 October 2000 Done
Process accounting. Tor Egge, John Baldwin 5 October 2000 Done
Make ethernet drivers thread-safe. Bill Paul 15 October 2000 Done
Make the mutex headers mostly machine-independent. John Baldwin 20 October 2000 Done
Rename SMP_DEBUG to MUTEX_DEBUG. John Baldwin 20 October 2000 Done
Give each soft interrupt its own thread. Chuck Paterson 25 October 2000 Done
Make sf_bufs (sendfile(2)) thread-safe. Bosko Milekic 5 November 2000 Done
Make the witness code work correctly. John Baldwin 18 November 2000 Done
Split the ktr-specific code out of db_interface.c. John Baldwin 15 December 2000 Done
Convert the sio driver to using a spin mutex. John Baldwin 18 December 2000 Done
Implement condition variables. Jake Burkholder, Jason Evans 15 January 2001 Done
Add a flag to mtx_init() (MTX_RECURSE) that denotes whether a mutex is allowed to recurse. Bosko Milekic 19 January 2001 Done
Make the zone allocator thread-safe. Dag-Erling Smorgrav 21 January 2001 Done
Convert simplelocks to mutexes. Jason Evans 24 January 2001 Done
Make kernel preemptive with respect to interrupts. Jake Burkholder 31 January 2001 Done
Cleanup of mutex API. Bosko Milekic 8 February 2001 Done
Remove COM_LOCK. Mark Murray 11 February 2001 Done
Merge various scheduling classes into one run queue. Modify scheduler to support preemptable kernel. Jake Burkholder 11 February 2001 Done
Make priority propagation work correctly. Jake Burkholder 11 February 2001 Done
Make most of the interrupt thread code MI and shared between hardware and software interrupts. John Baldwin 18 February 2001 Done
Add protection to struct jail and jail-related functionality. Robert Watson 20 February 2001 Done
Implement sx (shared/exclusive) locks. Jason Evans 5 March 2001 Done
Generalize/improve witness to handle more complex locking primitives (mtx, sx). John Baldwin 28 March 2001 Done
Convert the allproc and proctree locks from lockmgr locks to sx locks. John Baldwin 28 March 2001 Done
Make mbuf system use condition variables instead of msleep()/wakeup(). Bosko Milekic 2 April 2001 Done
Remove <sys/mutex.h> includes from other kernel headers such as <vm/vm_zone.h>, <sys/resourcevar.h>, <sys/ucred.h>, and <sys/mbuf.h>. Mark Murray 15 May 2001 Done
Cleanup the various mp_machdep.c's, unify various SMP API's such as IPI delivery, etc. John Baldwin 15 May 2001 Done
Make most of the forward_* and forwarded_* functions MI. John Baldwin 15 May 2001 Done
Complete the MD support for SMP on the Alpha platform. Andrew Gallatin, Doug Rabson, John Baldwin 15 May 2001 Done
Convert select() to use condition variables. Seigo Tanimura 15 May 2001 Done
Add a "giant" lock around the VM subsystem. Alfred Perlstein 13 June 2001 Done
Introduce a modified slab allocator for the mbuf subsystem. Bosko Milekic 21 June 2001 Done
Add a witness_assert() function to handle lock assertions. John Baldwin 27 June 2001 Done
Extend sx locks to support try lock operations. John Baldwin 27 June 2001 Done
Document KTR. John Baldwin 28 June 2001 Done
Make fork_return, fork_exit, ast, and userret MI. John Baldwin 29 June 2001 Done
Make sched_lock's savecrit a per-process property saved and restored in mi_switch and initialized in fork_exit. John Baldwin 30 June 2001 Done
Make ast() loop. John Baldwin 10 August 2001 Done
Add upgrade/downgrade sx lock operations. Alexander Kabaev, Jason Evans 13 August 2001 Done
Implement semaphores. Jason Evans 14 August 2001 Done
Add support for upgrade/downgrades in witness. John Baldwin 23 August 2001 Done
Make most of cpu_wait() and cpu_exit() MI. Peter Wemm 9 September 2001 Done
Split NFS into client and server. Peter Wemm 18 Oct 2001 Done
Lock taskqueues. Andrew Reiter, John Baldwin 25 October 2001 Done
Add a per-thread ucred reference. John Baldwin 25 October 2001 Done
Make most of the per-CPU stuff MI. John Baldwin 11 December 2001 Done
Make critical section saved state per-thread instead of per-lock so that interlocking spin locks work properly. John Baldwin 17 December 2001 Done
Replace the APIC-specific imen_mtx with a MI-named icu_lock to protect interrupt controllers and associated data within the kernel for both i386 and alpha. John Baldwin 20 December 2001 Done
Use the per-thread critical section nesting level in the mutex and interrupt thread code to automatically determine when to not preempt. This makes the MTX_NOSWITCH, SWI_SWITCH, and SWI_NOSWITCH flags obsolete as the kernel will be able to figure out the proper behavior on its own. John Baldwin 5 January 2002 Done
Lock struct filedesc and struct file. Seigo Tanimura, Alfred Perlstein 12 January 2002 Done
Lock struct pgrp, struct session, and struct sigio. Seigo Tanimura 23 February 2002 Done
Lock pipe implementation, but not sigio/fown, VM interactions. Alfred Perlstein 27 February 2002 Done
Move to explicit reference counting for soft vnode references. Poul-Henning Kamp 8 March 2002 Done
Initialize mutex pools early enough that sx locks can be used for VM. Brian Feldman 14 March 2002 Done
Place a global lock (sellock) around selinfo structures to fix a variety of lock order reversals, and make select() MP-safe. Alfred Perlstein, Chad David 14 March 2002 Done
Push down Giant on read, write, pread, pwrite system calls, acquiring Giant in the per-subsystem fileop layer for sockets, VFS, etc. Alfred Perlstein 15 March 2002 Done
Lock down kernel module structures. Andrew Reiter 18 March 2002 Done
Lock down kernel linker globals. Andrew Reiter 18 March 2002 Done
Rewrite kernel memory allocator to be a slab allocator that uses per-cpu caches. Jeff Roberson 21 March 2002 Done
Replace incorrect use of MD critical section API to disable interrupts with a specific interrupt disable API. Warner Losh, Doug Rabson, Benno Rice, John Baldwin 21 March 2002 Done
Lock down access to the shared p_args "process arguments" structure through appropriate protection of that structure and references to it. Jonathan Mini 31 March 2002 Done
Move from flags/tsleep lock to sx locks to protect sysctl tree from updates during sysctl operations. Jonathan Mini 1 April 2002 Done
Create/port userland tool to manage KTR event dumps. Jake Burkholder 1 April 2002 Done
Create MTX_SYSINIT and SX_SYSINIT macros that allow for initializing locks that are subsystem independent. Andrew Reiter 2 April 2002 Done
Lock down the global securelevel variable. Andrew Reiter 2 April 2002 Done
Make grow_stack() MI. Possibly even a macro or inline. Alan L. Cox 6 April 2002 Done
Lock use of p_fd, which otherwise can result in corrupted p_fd panics during heavy operation. Start with a global, and move to per-proc locking. Alfred Perlstein, Seigo Tanimura 8 April 2002 Done
Lock struct pargs. Jonathan Mini 9 April 2002 Done
Lock sysctl hierarchy. Jonathan Mini 9 April 2002 Done
Make {o,}sigreturn() MPSAFE. Alan L. Cox 11 April 2002 Done
Rewrite kernel memory allocator so that Giant is not required for malloc() or free(). Jeff Roberson 2 May 2002 Done
Replace complex shared/exclusive locking scheme in the VM system with a purely exclusive lockmgr locking scheme, simplifying locking and removing potential livelock/deadlock scenarios. Brian Feldman, Alan L. Cox 3 May 2002 Done
Push down Giant into readv/writev system calls in style of read/write/pread/pwrite once malloc no longer requires Giant in the handling of iovec structures for uio. Alan L. Cox 9 May 2002 Done
Push down Giant in mprotect(), minherit(), and madvise() so that it is no longer acquired and released directly. Alan L. Cox 18 May 2002 Done
Update suser() and p_can*() APIs to accept threads instead of processes. John Baldwin 18 May 2002 Done
Broadly transition to td_ucred from p_ucred once KSE dependencies are in place. John Baldwin 18 May 2002 Done
Add a witness_sleep() check to uma_zalloc() to catch code calling malloc() or uma_zalloc() while holding non-sleepable locks. John Baldwin 20 May 2002 Done
Optimize UP support by changing spin locks to only perform critical section enter and exits. John Baldwin 21 May 2002 Done
Make sleep mutexes spin if the current lock holder is executing on another CPU. John Baldwin 21 May 2002 Done
Add support for the IA32 pause instruction to spin loops in locks. John Baldwin 21 May 2002 Done
Make KTRACE write into tracefiles asynchronously. John Baldwin 7 June 2002 Done
Remove Giant from modnext(2), modfnext(2), modstat(2),and modfind(2). Andrew Reiter 25 June 2002 Done
Fix synchronization of TLB flushes and invlpg() on x86 SMP. Peter Wemm 12 July 2002 Done
Add KTR(9) tracing for mutex contention. Ian Dowse 26 Augist 2002 Done
Make cpu_coredump MI. Peter Wemm 7 September 2002 Done
Add a subsystem lock to the accounting code. Andrew Reiter 11 September 2002 Done
Allow KTR(9) to write trace records to alq(9) record facility. Jeff Roberson 22 September 2002 Done
Create mechanism in cdevsw structure to protect thread-unsafe drivers. Poul-Henning Kamp 27 September 2002 Done
Fix SIGXPU and other #if 0'd things in mi_switch(). John Baldwin 30 September 2002 Done
Lock down TrustedBSD MAC implementation. Robert Watson 11 November 2002 Done
Lock eventhandlers. Mike Smith, Jonathan Mini, John Baldwin 11 March 2003 Done
Fix PHOLD() so that it blocks to guarantee PS_INMEM. John Baldwin 22 April 2003 Done
Fix various procfs_machdep.c to not use sched_lock. John Baldwin 22 April 2003 Done
Lock all references to process credentials and remove Giant from process credential-related system calls. John Baldwin 1 May 2003 Done
Merge the procsig and sigacts structures, move the new sigacts structure out of the U-area and add appropriate locking. John Baldwin 13 May 2003 Done
Remove Giant from the kill() and killpg() system calls. John Baldwin 13 May 2003 Done
Enhance the mutex pool implementation to allow creation and use of multiple, dynamically allocated pools with adjustable pool sizes and mutex options. Don Lewis 16 July 2003 Done
Create mutex profiling tool for the kernel so as to measure contention and behavior of kernel mutexes. Eivind Eklund, Dag-Erling Smorgrav 31 March 2002 Done
Lock down linker_file_t structures in the kernel linker. Andrew Reiter 19 June 2002 Done
Lock pipe implementation: VM optimizations.   4 October 2003 Done
Reimplement i386 interrupt and SMP code so that SMP kernels work on UP boxes and SMP can be enabled in GENERIC. John Baldwin 3 November 2003 Done
Implement generic turnstiles to use when blocking on non-sleepable locks. John Baldwin 11 November 2003 Done
Split witness_lock() into witness_checkorder() and witness_lock(). witness_checkorder() would be called before acquiring a lock to increase the changes of detecting and warning about a reversal prior to deadlocking. witness_lock() would simply update witness' internal state to note that a lock has been acquired. John Baldwin 24 January 2004 Done
Lock per-process resource limits. Mike Makonnen, John Baldwin 4 February 2004 Done
Implement a sleep queue abstraction to be used by both msleep() and condition variables. This new abstraction should use a hash table of sleep queues with a spin lock on each sleep queue chain similar to turnstile chain locks to make sched_lock finger grained. John Baldwin 27 February 2004 Done
Remove Giant from jail(2). Andrew Reiter, Robert Watson 23 April 2004 Done
Add subsystem locking to NFSv2, NFSv3 server, permitting upcalls and other network-related elements to run Giant-free. Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Add KTR(9) tracing for UMA allocation/free events. Robert Watson 05 August 2004 Done
Add KTR(9) tracing for GEOM I/O events. Robert Watson 21 October 2004 Done
Add KTR(9) tracing for busdma events. Robert Watson 23 October 2004 Done
Add KTR(9) tracing for critical sections. Robert Watson 07 November 2004 Done
Make the kernel fully preemptive. John Baldwin 24 November 2004 Done
Lock pipe implementation: sigio/fown-related evil. Alfred Perlstein 24 November 2004 Done
Lock down the SysV IPC code. Alfred Perlstein 24 November 2004 Done
Lock contention measurement tool to measure heat of various locks, including Giant, and permit more directed performance and locking strategy optimization. Robert Watson 24 November 2004 Done
Add KTR(9) tracing to scheduler run queues. Jeff Roberson 26 December 2004 Done
Review locking strategy and correctness of VFS operations and fix up various failure modes associated with enabling VFS locking assertions. Jeff Roberson 01 January 2005 Done
Document in-vnode locking strategy, clean it up. Jeff Roberson 01 January 2005 Done
Run cross-file system VFS without Giant, acquiring Giant conditionally based on a file system flag. Jeff Roberson 01 January 2005 Done
Run UFS file system MPSAFE. Jeff Roberson 01 January 2005 Done
Add KTR(9) tracing for buffer cache events. Jeff Roberson 24 January 2005 Done
Break out critical section and spin lock APIs, and re-optimize critical sections to not disable interrupts in hardware due to the high cost on some hardware architectures. John Baldwin 04 April 2005 Done
Modify uma(9) to use critical sections to protect per-CPU statistics, instead of mutexdes, in order to optimize access. Robert Watson 29 April 2005 Done
Migrate malloc(9) to per-CPU statistics, and use critical sections to optimize access to those statistics. Robert Watson 29 May 2005 Done
Add KTR(9) support for KTR_VFS to trace additional VFS events, rather than mechanically inserted KTR_VOP events. Jeff Roberson 11 June 2005 Done
Push the grabbing of Giant into Linux i386 ABI system calls. John Baldwin 13 July 2005 Done
Push the grabbing of Giant into Linux AXP ABI system calls. John Baldwin 13 July 2005 Done
Push the grabbing of Giant into SVR4 i386 ABI system calls. John Baldwin 13 July 2005 Done
Push the grabbing of Giant into OSF/1 AXP ABI system calls. John Baldwin 13 July 2005 Done
Push the grabbing of Giant into IBCS i386 ABI system calls. John Baldwin 13 July 2005 Done
Add a new witness check for exiting threads to verify that an exiting thread holds no locks. John Baldwin 2 September 2005 Done
Implement atomic_fetchadd() for ints. John Baldwin 27 September 2005 Done
Implement a simple reference count API using atomic operations and use this to replace locks that just protect a reference count. John Baldwin 27 September 2005 Done
Split the interrupt handler list out of struct ithread into its own structure and only start up kthreads for interrupt vectors that actually have threaded interrupt handlers. John Baldwin 25 October 2005 Done
Lock aio(4). David Xu 22 January 2006 Done
Implement reader/writer locks. John Baldwin 27 January 2006 Done
Lock struct proc. John Baldwin 20 February 2001 In progress
Lock down the tty subsystem. Dick Garner, Jeremy Scofield, Thomas Moestl, Poul-Henning Kamp 24 July 2004 In progress
Fix clock locking to be the same on all platforms. John Baldwin 16 November 2001 In progress
Make use of process locking and process reference counting to protect debugging interfaces (and procfs). John Baldwin 27 February 2002 In progress
Make use of process locking to protect process monitoring sysctls, including those employed by 'ps' and related tools. John Baldwin 27 February 2002 In progress
Lock down newbus infrastructure to support driver fine-graining. Warner Losh 28 February 2002 In progress
Remove the MP safe syscall flag from the syscall table and add explicit mtx_lock/unlock's of Giant to all syscalls. Matt Dillon, Maxime Henrion, Robert Watson 24 July 2004 In progress
SMPng architecture document. John Baldwin, Robert Watson 28 February 2002 In progress
Move to shared lock for VOP_GETATTR() to reduce blocking during frequent lightweight VFS operations. Modify namei() to provide a LOOKUP_SHARED flag to indicate when the lock required may be shared instead of exclusive. Jeff Roberson 11 March 2002 In progress
Document existing vm_map locking and verify it's correctness. Alan L. Cox 18 May 2002 In progress
Document existing vm_object locking and verify it's correctness. Alan L. Cox 4 May 2002 In progress
Implement lazy interrupt thread switching (context stealing) on i386. Bosko Milekic, Alexander Kabaev 10 December 2002 In progress
Implement lazy interrupt thread switching (context stealing) on sparc64. Jake Burkholder 10 December 2002 In progress
Switch from using lockmgr in VM to using a mutex or exclusive sxlock. Push down Giant on all VM except for vm_object/VFS and vm_page/pmap components. Alan L. Cox 10 December 2002 In progress
Modify device driver API to permit drivers to more easily split "in interrupt context" and "in interrupt thread" code so as to acknowledge interrupts faster. This will permit lower latency in interrupt handling. Peter Wemm, Scott Long 1 July 2005 In progress
Make printf() safe to call in almost any situation to avoid deadlocks. Chuck Paterson 15 May 2001 Stalled
Conditionalize atomic ops in the SMP code that are used for debugging statistics. Peter Wemm 15 March 2001 Not Started
Axe schedcpu() in favor of event driven priority updates as much as possible.   7 September 2001 Not Started
Fix *hold (e.g. crhold) to return reference to object.   7 September 2001 Not Started
Add witness checking for lockmgr locks.   7 September 2001 Not Started
Add ICU spin locks on ia64.   4 January 2002 Not Started
Expand mutex profiling tool to also profile sx locks. Eivind Eklund, Dag-Erling Smorgrav 1 April 2002 Not Started
Add a witness_sleep() check to copyin/out() and s/fuword(). John Baldwin 7 June 2002 Not Started
Remove Giant from mi_startup() and push Giant down into individual SYSINIT functions. Many SYSINIT functions probably do not need Giant anyway.   21 October 2005 Not Started

This table lists the todo subtasks for multithreading the network stack.

Task Responsible Last updated Status
Protect network interface queues. Jonathan Lemon 24 November 2000 Done
Lock up IP. Jennifer Yang, Jeffrey Hsu 10 June 2002 Done
Lock up TCP. Jennifer Yang, Jeffrey Hsu, Sam Leffler, Robert Watson 24 November 2004 Done
Lock up UDP. Jennifer Yang, Jeffrey Hsu, Robert Watson 24 November 2004 Done
Lock ifaddr reference counts. Jeffrey Hsu 18 December 2002 Done
Lock up ifnet list. Jeffrey Hsu 21 December 2002 Done
Lock radix trees. Jeffrey Hsu 23 December 2002 Done
Lock up ARP. Jeffrey Hsu 16 January 2003 Done
Lock up raw IP. Sam Leffler, Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Lock divert sockets. Sam Leffler 4 October 2003 Done
Lock ipfw2. Sam Leffler 4 October 2003 Done
Lock DUMMYNET. Sam Leffler 4 October 2003 Done
Lock ethernet bridge. Sam Leffler 4 October 2003 Done
Lock IP fragment queues. Robert Watson 4 October 2003 Done
Lock routing entries. Sam Leffler 4 October 2003 Done
Lock FAST_IPSEC. Sam Leffler 4 October 2003 Done
Permit parallel entry into isr processing. Robert Watson, Sam Leffler 11 October 2003 Done
Lock if_disc "discard interface". Robert Watson 9 March 2004 Done
Lock if_faith "IPv6-to-IPv4 TCP relay interface. " Sam Leffler, Robert Watson 9 March 2004 Done
Lock if_gif "generic tunnel interface". Robert Watson 9 March 2004 Done
Review ECN tunnel support (ip_ecn.c). Robert Watson 9 March 2004 Done
if_tap global and softc locking. Robert Watson 23 April 2004 Done
if_tun global and softc locking. Robert Watson 23 April 2004 Done
netatalk/aarp.c locking. Robert Watson 23 April 2004 Done
Cache socket MAC label in inpcb label for IPv4 sockets so that the label can be used safely at the inet layer without socket locks. Robert Watson 23 April 2004 Done
IP encapsulation subroutines (ip_encap.c). Robert Watson 23 April 2004 Done
Lock globals in loopback interface (if_loop.c). Robert Watson 23 April 2004 Done
Use m_tags in if_gif to limit looping configurations, rather than a non-MPSAFE static coutner. Ruslan Ermilov 23 April 2004 Done
netatalk DDP PCB locking. Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Lock up syncache. Jeffrey Hsu, Sam Leffler 10 November 2003 Done
Permit IP forwarding path to run Giant-free. Sam Leffler 1 December 2003 Done
Lock UNIX® domain protocols, fifofs. Sam Leffler, Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Giant lock over NFS server to protect against so_upcall() w/o Giant Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Lock interface cloning meta-data. Brooks Davis 24 July 2004 Done
Apply combination of socket and socket buffer locks, label caching to MAC labels on sockets so that they can be used safely without Giant. Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Make routing socket message dispatch use a netisr to avoid re-entering the socket code from the routing code, resolving lock order issues. Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Introduce accept locking to protect accept incomplete and complete queues on listen sockets. Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Break out socket buffer wakeup, socket buffer append, socket state change, socket buffer reserve, flush, etc, calls into _locked() and unlocked versions, and avoid conditional locking. Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Lock down AARP, AppleTalk Address Resoluton Protocol. Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Fix pull/push cache data synchronization issues in sosend(), soreceive(), allowing them to run Giant-free. Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Protect socket global counters/limits and generation number with a mutex. Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Lock down unit allocation meta-data in interface related netgraph modules. Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Lock down socket buffer OOB fields across TCP/IP, IPX. Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Add MSG_NBIO so that fifofs can avoid frobbing SO_NBIO in a manner that risks races. Don Lewis 24 July 2004 Done
Protect all use of so_count with socket lock. Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Move socket buffer related state from so_state to sb_state so it can be properly locked by the socket buffer mutex. Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Introduce a temporary global lock to lock the if_label field used by the MAC Framework. Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Push VFS-specific behavior out of fdrop_locked() and acquire Giant in the fo_close per-object methods rather than fdrop_locked(), so that pipes and sockets can run fo_close() Giant-free. Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Push Giant acquisition into fo_stat() file descriptor stat operation, rather than acquiring it in fstat(), so that fstat() on sockets and pipes can run Giant-free. Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Don't hold socket locks over entry to protocol switch methods, allowing protocol methods to acquire socket locks after protocol locks in the lock order. Robert Watson 24 July 2004 Done
Port inpcb mutex locking, assertions from IPv4 to IPv6. Robert Watson 8 August 2004 Done
Add IFF_NEEDSGIANT to allow if_start to run with Giant for specific interfaces. Defer if_start to task queue. Robert Watson 8 August 2004 Done
Push down Giant in stat(), fo_stat() to allow Giant-free stat of pipes, sockets. Robert Watson 8 August 2004 Done
Add TCP lock assertions. Robert Watson 24 November 2004 Done
Lock socket layer. Sam Leffler, Robert Watson 24 November 2004 Done
Review TCP timer code. Robert Watson 24 November 2004 Done
Analyze and reduce cost of entropy gathering in network critical paths. Robert Watson, Mark Murray 24 November 2004 Done
Allow code to declare NET_NEEDS_GIANT(), forcing Giant over the network stack if that code is compiled into the kernel. Robert Watson 28 August 2004 Done
Disable Giant over the network stack in the default configuration. Robert Watson 28 August 2004 Done
Additional KTR tracing for UMA, callouts, interrupts, etc. Robert Watson 07 November 2004 Done
Move to using file descriptor reference counts instead of socket reference counts for socket system calls, avoiding extra reference couht operations. Robert Watson 24 October 2004 Done
Lock IPv6. Sam Leffler, Robert Watson, Hajimu UMEMOTO, Max Laier 8 August 2004 In progress
if_ppp global, per-softc locking. Robert Watson, Maurycy Pawlowski-Wieronski <maurycy@fouk.org> 23 April 2004 In progress
Lock struct ifnet. Max Laier, Luigi Rizzo, Maurycy Pawlowski-Wieronski <maurycy@fouk.org> 23 April 2004 In progress
Lock IPv4, IPv6, atalk interface address lists. Max Laier, Robert Watson 8 August 2004 In progress
Lock consumers of BSD compress (bsd_comp.c) code to protect compression state. Robert Watson 23 April 2004 In progress
Lock global and softc state for six-to-four converter (if_stf.c). Robert Watson 23 April 2004 In progress
Lock down global and softc state for SLIP (if_sl.c). Robert Watson 23 April 2004 In progress
Lock global and softc state for SPPP (if_sppsubr.c). Roman Kurakin, Robert Watson 23 April 2004 In progress
IGMP locking. Robert Watson 23 April 2004 In progress
IP ID locking. Stephan Uphoff 24 June 2005 In progress
Lock down netnatm. Robert Watson 01 July 2005 In progress
Research and select options for inbound network stack parallelism. Direct dispatch is one option currently being considered. Robert Watson 19 October 2005 In progress
Locking for polling(4). Pawel Jakub Dawidek, Gleb Smirnoff 19 October 2005 In progress
Reduce contention upon locking a socket buffer by replacing tsleep() and wakeup() with a condvar. Seigo Tanimura 21 April 2002 Not Started
Lock if_ef "ethernet frame" driver.   9 March 2004 Not Started
Further cleanup of socket state machine in order to facilitate finishing socking locking of state transitions. Robert Watson 19 October 2005 Not Started
Lock KAME IPSEC.   19 October 2005 Not Started
Only one of our ATM stacks is MPSAFE, the other two should be deleted or fixed.   19 October 2005 Not Started
Lock ND6 (IPv6 Neighbor Discovery). George V. Neville-Neil 19 October 2005 Not Started
Lock IPv6 multicast address lists.   19 October 2005 Not Started
Lock IPv4 and IPv6 global address lists.   19 October 2005 Not Started
Continued cleanup of the stack/device driver ownership and locking for struct ifnet needs to be done. Most fields are now either locked or assigned ownership. Some fields, such as if_flags, need a bit more cleanup due to device drivers modifying stack-owned fields. Robert Watson 19 October 2005 Not Started
BPF locking needs some cleanup, there are some race conditions there relating to interface removal.   19 October 2005 Not Started
When interfaces are torn down, there are a number of races (not all associated with SMPng) that need to be thought about.   19 October 2005 Not Started
Lock if_vlan and inter-layer multicast address manipulation and synchronization in if_vlan. Gleb Smirnoff, Yar Tikhiy 19 October 2005 Not Started
Further investigate locking in in_gif and in6_gif.   19 October 2005 Not Started
FAST_IPSEC and KAME IPSEC's PF_KEY support likely needs an asynchronous dispatch to prevent socket lock ordering issues similar to what was done for PF_ROUTE. Robert Watson 19 October 2005 Not Started
Investigate how to eliminate the use of ACCEPT_LOCK(), which currently prevents races in the tear-down of sockets. Robert Watson 19 October 2005 Not Started
Fix SMP problems with netgraph restructuring. Gleb Smirnoff 19 October 2005 Not Started
Verify locking in netgraph nodes and improve where necessary. Gleb Smirnoff 19 October 2005 Not Started
More finely-grained locking for pf(4). Gleb Smirnoff 19 October 2005 Not Started

Known Issues

Issue Last updated Status
Idle processor time is not charged to the idle processes. 20 September 2000 Resolved
microuptime creeps backwards. 4 October 2000 Resolved
microuptime() went backwards 4 October 2000 Resolved
Process accounting is not accurate (the more CPUs, the closer to correct it is). 5 October 2000 Resolved
M_DEVBUF is probably the wrong memory pool for interrupt stuff and we should think about creating a new malloc pool for that stuff. 9 February 2001 Resolved
PC card eject panics due to a race condition in the interrupt thread code. 15 March 2001 Resolved
SMP x86 boxes are seeing NCPU * 100 clk interrupts and NCPU * 128 rtc interrupts. 15 May 2001 Resolved
Witness will infinitely recurse when it acquires Giant after sleeping with a sleepable lock. 27 June 2001 Resolved
Serial gdb does not work if boot_ddb and boot_gdb options are specified. 14 July 2002 Resolved
Serial gdb does not work at 115200 baud. 14 July 2002 Resolved
Serial gdb never regains control once 'cont' has been entered. 14 July 2002 Resolved
Profiling is broken. 20 February 2001 Unresolved

News

The remainder of this page is structured as a reverse-chronological log.

28 August 2004
  • Robert Watson threw the switch to change the network stack to run without the Giant lock by default, permitting the network stack to be run on multiple CPUs at a time, as well as to preempt and be preempted by other code.

30 October 2003
  • Greg Lehey submitted a FreeBSD SMPng paper to the Asian Enterprise Open Source Conference in Singapore. The paper presents a historical view of SMPng development through 2001, but omits discussion of more recent progress on the SMPng project, such as substantial performance enhancements resulting from extensive lock pushdown in the storage subsystem, VM subsystem, and major IPC subsystems.

13 January 2002 15 May 2001
  • Greg Lehey has made his USENIX paper available, which he will present in Boston at the end of June.

22 March 2001 5 March 2001 24 January 2001 12 January 2001 11 October 2000
  • John Baldwin and Chuck Paterson came up with a preliminary list of rules that should be followed when working on kernel synchronization.

6 September 2000
  • The SMP code has been committed. All further work is being done in cvs rather than with patches.

  • An updated patch is available for download. This patch is probably what will actually get committed.

5 September 2000
  • An updated patch is available for download. This patch makes rtc a fast interrupt, uses locked instructions for mutexes in MP kernels, and corrects mtx_*() linkage within modules.

1 September 2000
  • The code is working for the most part now on i386 (UP and MP). Some additional coding is still necessary for the alpha, which is being done now.

30 August 2000
  • Updated patches for i386 and alpha are available here.

12 August 2000
  • Updated patches for i386 are available here. Process accounting still doesn't work correctly, but a number of other improvements have been made.

3 August 2000
  • Patches with functional heavy-weight threads for the i386 platform are available here. There are a couple of minor issues with this patch set. Specifically, process accounting doesn't work correctly.

6 July 2000
  • Sheldon Hearn has prepared a mutex(9) man page based on the BSD/OS one, which is available here.

5 July 2000
  • Jake Burkholder put an updated patch here.

3 July 2000
  • Jake Burkholder has the BSD/OS lock code working now, and has incorporated the pertinent portions of Matt Dillon's patches (idle processes, some of the schedlock changes, etc.). His patch set is available here.

26 June 2000
  • Chuck Paterson has provided the PostScript versions of his presentation slides for the first day and second day of the SMP meeting.

25 June 2000 19 June 2000