[gambit-list] Marc what's the rationale for "--enable-multiple-threaded-vms --enable-smp"?

Adam adam.mlmb at gmail.com
Tue Mar 17 20:51:13 EDT 2020


On Wed, 18 Mar 2020 at 00:05, Marc Feeley <feeley at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

>
> > On Mar 17, 2020, at 10:42 AM, Adam <adam.mlmb at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Marc,
> >
> > Small thing, just curious, I think also this may have been clarified in
> some mail thread I have somewhere but I can't find it now:
> >
> > What is the rationale for "--enable-multiple-threaded-vms --enable-smp"
> to be the enabling arguments for SMP?
> >
> > Neither "--enable-multiple-threaded-vms" nor "--enable-smp" individually
> will do it.
>
> To address parallelism, Gambit's Virtual Machine (VM) is organised
> hierarchically into N “processors” per VM.  Each Gambit “processor” can
> execute Scheme code independently from other “processors”.  When running on
> a typical OS a “processor” is an OS level thread.  If Gambit was running on
> bare metal then a “processor” would be a physical core of the CPU.
>
> Having multiple processors is useful to run Scheme threads in parallel and
> also to perform garbage-collection faster (using parallelism to shorten the
> GC pause time).
>
> Gambit has 2 thread schedulers that can be configured.
>
> The non-SMP scheduler (which is the default) is the most mature and
> supports priority inheritance.  However it multiplexes all the Scheme
> threads on just one processor, so it doesn’t take advantage of any hardware
> parallelism to accelerate the execution of the Scheme threads.
>
> The SMP scheduler (enabled with --enable-smp) is less stable and does not
> support priority inheritance.  On the plus side, it multiplexes the Scheme
> threads on all the processors and processors can steal work (runnable
> Scheme threads) from other processors to balance the load.
>
> With the --disable-multiple-threaded-vms flag (which is currently the
> default) the number of processors used by the Gambit VM is stuck to 1.
> With the --enable-multiple-threaded-vms flag the number of processors can
> be greater than 1 (and on typical machines it will be).  Note that you
> could enable multiple threaded vms and still have a number of processors
> equal to 1 (e.g. on a single-core machine, or using the -:p1 runtime
> option).
>
> With a single processor it is possible to use the SMP scheduler (mainly
> for testing the scheduler or the program).  With multiple processors it is
> possible to use the non-SMP scheduler (if you want more stability and
> faster GCs).
>
> So as you see the two flags don’t have to be tied together in any way, and
> it gives more configuration freedom.
>
> Marc
>

Interesting.

Are you saying that "--enable-multiple-threaded-vms" enables the
multiprocessor heap and garbage collector?

So "--enable-multiple-threaded-vms --disable-smp" is a Gambit that does not
work steal between processors.

But, it does share between processors one and the same heap and globals and
state variables and such in the Gambit runtime environment. (This is in
contrast with "--enable-multiple-vms", which does does not do that.)

Did I get it right?

Will "--disable-multiple-threaded-vms --enable-smp" produce a technically
broken Gambit?
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