5. RCU Library

Lockless data structures provide scalability and determinism. They enable use cases where locking may not be allowed (for example real-time applications).

In the following sections, the term “memory” refers to memory allocated by typical APIs like malloc() or anything that is representative of memory, for example an index of a free element array.

Since these data structures are lockless, the writers and readers are accessing the data structures concurrently. Hence, while removing an element from a data structure, the writers cannot return the memory to the allocator, without knowing that the readers are not referencing that element/memory anymore. Hence, it is required to separate the operation of removing an element into two steps:

1. Delete: in this step, the writer removes the reference to the element from the data structure but does not return the associated memory to the allocator. This will ensure that new readers will not get a reference to the removed element. Removing the reference is an atomic operation.
2. Free (Reclaim): in this step, the writer returns the memory to the memory allocator only after knowing that all the readers have stopped referencing the deleted element.

This library helps the writer determine when it is safe to free the memory by making use of thread Quiescent State (QS).

5.1. What is Quiescent State

Quiescent State can be defined as “any point in the thread execution where the thread does not hold a reference to shared memory”. It is up to the application to determine its quiescent state.

Let us consider the following diagram:

Fig. 5.2 Phases in the Quiescent State model.

As shown in Fig. 5.2, reader thread 1 accesses data structures D1 and D2. When it is accessing D1, if the writer has to remove an element from D1, the writer cannot free the memory associated with that element immediately. The writer can return the memory to the allocator only after the reader stops referencing D1. In other words, reader thread RT1 has to enter a quiescent state.

Similarly, since reader thread 2 is also accessing D1, the writer has to wait till thread 2 enters quiescent state as well.

However, the writer does not need to wait for reader thread 3 to enter quiescent state. Reader thread 3 was not accessing D1 when the delete operation happened. So, reader thread 1 will not have a reference to the deleted entry.

It can be noted that, the critical sections for D2 is a quiescent state for D1. i.e. for a given data structure Dx, any point in the thread execution that does not reference Dx is a quiescent state.

Since memory is not freed immediately, there might be a need for provisioning of additional memory, depending on the application requirements.

5.2. Factors affecting the RCU mechanism

It is important to make sure that this library keeps the overhead of identifying the end of grace period and subsequent freeing of memory, to a minimum. The following explains how grace period and critical section affect this overhead.

The writer has to poll the readers to identify the end of grace period. Polling introduces memory accesses and wastes CPU cycles. The memory is not available for reuse during the grace period. Longer grace periods exasperate these conditions.

The length of the critical section and the number of reader threads is proportional to the duration of the grace period. Keeping the critical sections smaller will keep the grace period smaller. However, keeping the critical sections smaller requires additional CPU cycles (due to additional reporting) in the readers.

Hence, we need the characteristics of a small grace period and large critical section. This library addresses this by allowing the writer to do other work without having to block until the readers report their quiescent state.

5.3. RCU in DPDK

For DPDK applications, the start and end of a while(1) loop (where no references to shared data structures are kept) act as perfect quiescent states. This will combine all the shared data structure accesses into a single, large critical section which helps keep the overhead on the reader side to a minimum.

DPDK supports a pipeline model of packet processing and service cores. In these use cases, a given data structure may not be used by all the workers in the application. The writer does not have to wait for all the workers to report their quiescent state. To provide the required flexibility, this library has a concept of a QS variable. The application can create one QS variable per data structure to help it track the end of grace period for each data structure. This helps keep the grace period to a minimum.

5.4. How to use this library

The application must allocate memory and initialize a QS variable.

Applications can call rte_rcu_qsbr_get_memsize() to calculate the size of memory to allocate. This API takes a maximum number of reader threads, using this variable, as a parameter. Currently, a maximum of 1024 threads are supported.

Further, the application can initialize a QS variable using the API rte_rcu_qsbr_init().

Each reader thread is assumed to have a unique thread ID. Currently, the management of the thread ID (for example allocation/free) is left to the application. The thread ID should be in the range of 0 to maximum number of threads provided while creating the QS variable. The application could also use lcore_id as the thread ID where applicable.

The rte_rcu_qsbr_thread_register() API will register a reader thread to report its quiescent state. This can be called from a reader thread. A control plane thread can also call this on behalf of a reader thread. The reader thread must call rte_rcu_qsbr_thread_online() API to start reporting its quiescent state.

Some of the use cases might require the reader threads to make blocking API calls (for example while using eventdev APIs). The writer thread should not wait for such reader threads to enter quiescent state. The reader thread must call rte_rcu_qsbr_thread_offline() API, before calling blocking APIs. It can call rte_rcu_qsbr_thread_online() API once the blocking API call returns.

The writer thread can trigger the reader threads to report their quiescent state by calling the API rte_rcu_qsbr_start(). It is possible for multiple writer threads to query the quiescent state status simultaneously. Hence, rte_rcu_qsbr_start() returns a token to each caller.

The writer thread must call rte_rcu_qsbr_check() API with the token to get the current quiescent state status. Option to block till all the reader threads enter the quiescent state is provided. If this API indicates that all the reader threads have entered the quiescent state, the application can free the deleted entry.

The APIs rte_rcu_qsbr_start() and rte_rcu_qsbr_check() are lock free. Hence, they can be called concurrently from multiple writers even while running as worker threads.

The separation of triggering the reporting from querying the status provides the writer threads flexibility to do useful work instead of blocking for the reader threads to enter the quiescent state or go offline. This reduces the memory accesses due to continuous polling for the status.

The rte_rcu_qsbr_synchronize() API combines the functionality of rte_rcu_qsbr_start() and blocking rte_rcu_qsbr_check() into a single API. This API triggers the reader threads to report their quiescent state and polls till all the readers enter the quiescent state or go offline. This API does not allow the writer to do useful work while waiting and introduces additional memory accesses due to continuous polling.

The reader thread must call rte_rcu_qsbr_thread_offline() and rte_rcu_qsbr_thread_unregister() APIs to remove itself from reporting its quiescent state. The rte_rcu_qsbr_check() API will not wait for this reader thread to report the quiescent state status anymore.

The reader threads should call rte_rcu_qsbr_quiescent() API to indicate that they entered a quiescent state. This API checks if a writer has triggered a quiescent state query and update the state accordingly.

The rte_rcu_qsbr_lock() and rte_rcu_qsbr_unlock() are empty functions. However, when CONFIG_RTE_LIBRTE_RCU_DEBUG is enabled, these APIs aid in debugging issues. One can mark the access to shared data structures on the reader side using these APIs. The rte_rcu_qsbr_quiescent() will check if all the locks are unlocked.