PyPy Status Blog: Update on STM

Hi all,

A quick update on Software Transactional Memory. We are working on two fronts.

On the one hand, the integration of the "c4" C library with PyPy is done and works well, but is still subject to improvements. The "PyPy-STM" executable (without the JIT) seems to be stable, as far as it has been tested. It runs a simple benchmark like Richards with a 3.2x slow-down over a regular JIT-less PyPy.

The main factor of this slow-down: the numerous "barriers" in the code --- checks that are needed a bit everywhere to verify that a pointer to an object points to a recent enough version, and if not, to go to the most recent version. These barriers are inserted automatically during the translation; there is no need for us to manually put 42 million barriers in the source code of PyPy. But this automatic insertion uses a primitive algorithm right now, which usually ends up putting more barriers than the theoretical optimum. I (Armin) am trying to improve that --- and progressing: last week the slow-down was around 4.5x. This is done in the branchstmgc-static-barrier.

On the other hand, Remi is progressing on the JIT integration in the branch stmgc-c4. This has been working in simple cases since a couple of weeks by now, but the resulting "PyPy-JIT-STM" often crashes. This is because while the basics are not really hard, we keep hitting new issues that must be resolved.

The basics are that whenever the JIT is about to generate assembler corresponding to a load or a store in a GC object, it must first generate a bit of extra assembler that corresponds to the barrier that we need. This works fine by now (but could benefit from the same kind of optimizations described above, to reduce the number of barriers). The additional issues are all more subtle. I will describe the current one as an example: it is how to write constant pointers inside the assembler.

Remember that the STM library classifies objects as either "public" or "protected/private". A "protected/private" object is one which has not been seen by another thread so far. This is essential as an optimization, because we know that no other thread will access our protected or private objects in parallel, and thus we are free to modify their content in place. By contrast, public objects are frozen, and to do any change, we first need to build a different (protected) copy of the object. See thisblog post for more details.

So far so good, but the JIT will sometimes (actually often) hard-code constant pointers into the assembler it produces. For example, this is the case when the Python code being JITted creates an instance of a known class; the corresponding assembler produced by the JIT will reserve the memory for the instance and then write the constant type pointer in it. This type pointer is a GC object (in the simple model, it's the Python class object; in PyPy it's actually the "map" object, which isa different story).

The problem right now is that this constant pointer may point to a protected object. This is a problem because the same piece of assembler can later be executed by a different thread. If it does, then this different thread will create instances whose type pointer is bogus: looking like a protected object, but actually protected by a different thread. Any attempt to use this type pointer to change anything on the class itself will likely crash: the threads will all think they can safely change it in-place. To fix this, we need to make sure we only write pointers to public objects in the assembler. This is a bit involved because we need to ensure that there is a public version of the object to start with.

When this is done, we will likely hit the next problem, and the next one; but at some point it should converge (hopefully!) and we'll give you our first PyPy-JIT-STM ready to try. Stay tuned :-)

A bientôt,

Armin.