Futexes are Fun

Futexes are a synchronization primitive that is new to the 2.6 Linux kernel. If you're like me and had never heard of them before a few days ago, then I recommend reading Ulrich Drepper's article, Futexes are Tricky. To a Windows programmer like myself, futexes are a wonderful idea that would be lots of fun to play with. Essentially, they're the antithesis of Window's synchronization model.

Hmmm. I guess I'm showing how much I dislike Window's synchronization model...

Let's start there. In Windows, if you want to use a synchronization object, you go to the Micrsoft-approved zoo of Win32/.NET synchronization objects, and you find one that's close to what you need. You then modify your problem to fit this synchronization object.

Okay, the zoo of synchronization objects that Microsoft gives you isn't bad. There are some extremely useful ones in there. If you're using .NET, you even get to use a monitor, which was missing from Win32.

In fact, if you're doing relatively normal programming in Windows, you'll never even realize that you're missing futexes. However, if you're trying to build an application that has to have optimal performance, then you may want something unusual.

You may want to do a WaitForMultipleObjects on 65 mutexes. You may want to optimize a mutex implementation as much as possible, and you're willing to give up features like re-entrance. There are a lot of things you might need, and Microsoft deliberately doesn't give you all of them. Thomas Becker has tried to implement something that's not in Microsoft's zoo, and the difficulties that he ran into are instructive.

POSIX doesn't have a universal solution, either. However, it does have a monitor, and, assuming performance isn't an issue, you can solve any problem using this.

Futexes are all that and more. They let a programmer write their own synchronization object in user mode. They do this by avoiding doing anything that's unnecessary. A futex lets you have a thread join a wait list and sleep until it is woken. The user mode code decides when a thread will enter the wait list, and when threads in the wait list will get woken up. They're still a bit new, and they don't let you control which thread gets woken up with much precision. Even if it's missing some features, however, it's still an exciting idea. It allows user mode libraries almost complete control over the performance and features of a synchronization object.

That's pretty darn clever. My next goal is to find an application at PC-Doctor that needs a futex. It sounds like a lot of fun, but it won't work on Windows.

This originally appeared on PC-Doctor's blog.