Module thread_info

TLS, but async-signal-safe.

Unfortunately, because thread local storage isn’t async-signal-safe, we cannot soundly use it in our stack overflow handler. While this works without problems on most platforms, it can lead to undefined behaviour on others (such as GNU/Linux). Luckily, the POSIX specification documents two thread-specific values that can be accessed in asynchronous signal handlers: the value of pthread_self() and the address of errno. As pthread_t is an opaque platform-specific type, we use the address of errno here. As it is thread-specific and does not change over the lifetime of a thread, we can use &errno as a key for a BTreeMap that stores thread-specific data.

Concurrent access to this map is synchronized by two locks – an outer Mutex and an inner spin lock that also remembers the identity of the lock owner:

• The spin lock is the primary means of synchronization: since it only uses native atomics, it can be soundly used inside the signal handle as opposed to Mutex, which might not be async-signal-safe.
• The Mutex prevents busy-waiting in the setup logic, as all accesses there are performed with the Mutex held, which makes the spin-lock redundant in the common case.
• Finally, by using the errno address as the locked value of the spin lock, we can detect cases where a SIGSEGV occurred while the thread info is being modified.

Structs

ThreadInfo

UnlockOnDrop 🔒

Statics

LOCK 🔒

SPIN_LOCK 🔒

THREAD_INFO 🔒

Functions

delete_current_info

set_current_info

spin_lock_in_setup 🔒

with_current_info

Get the current thread’s information, if available.