A sync-point is a protected area where you have the warranty that no concurrency
access is possible. It is implementated as a thread barrier to enter in the
sync-point and another one to exit from it. Inside the sync-point, all threads
that must do some syncrhonous processing will be called one after the other
while all other threads will wait. All threads will then exit from the
sync-point at the same time.
A sync-point will be evaluated only when necessary because it is a costly
operation. To limit the waiting time of each threads, we must have a mechanism
to wakeup all threads. This is done with a pipe shared by all threads. By
writting in this pipe, we will interrupt all threads blocked on a poller. The
pipe is then flushed before exiting from the sync-point.
This file contains all functions and macros used to deal with concurrency in
HAProxy. It contains all high-level function to do atomic operation
(HA_ATOMIC_*). Note, for now, we rely on "__atomic" GCC builtins to do atomic
operation. So HAProxy can be compiled with the thread support iff these builtins
are available.
It also contains wrappers around plocks to use spin or read/write locks. These
wrappers are used to abstract the internal representation of the locking system
and to add information to help debugging, when compiled with suitable
options.
To add extra info on locks, you need to add DEBUG=-DDEBUG_THREAD or
DEBUG=-DDEBUG_FULL compilation option. In addition to timing info on locks, we
keep info on where a lock was acquired the last time (function name, file and
line). There are also the thread id and a flag to know if it is still locked or
not. This will be useful to debug deadlocks.
