About Haskell Thread Model

[Simon Marlow]

> On Mon, Oct 13, 2003 at 11:13:56AM +0200, Wolfgang Thaller wrote:
> > The reason why we currently do not take advantage of SMP is 
> that the 
> > Haskell Heap is a shared data structure which is modified 
> whenever a 
> > thunk (an unevaluated expression) is evaluated. Using 
> synchronisation 
> > primitives like pthread_mutex_lock for every evaluation of a thunk 
> > would be deadly for performance.
> > There is some old (1999) code in the GHC RTS that attempts 
> this (using 
> > intel cmpxchg instructions for synchronisation), but it's currently 
> > "bitrotted" and I don't know how successful it was.
> 
> cmpxchg and then taking a blocking lock sounds like the 2-tier locking
> supported with Linux' new futex system calls. I wonder how they chose
> to block in the older GHC RTS.

It was a spinlock.  There was also an attempt to avoid having to lock
every thunk entry and update by partitioning the allocation area
per-thread, taking advantage of the fact that most thunk entries and
updates are to objects created recently by the current thread.  This is
about where the experiment stalled - it was interesting, but even if the
heap partitioning turned out to be effective, the gains weren't really
going to be there without tackling multithreaded GC too (as Jan-Willem
already pointed out).

Cheers,
	Simon