A future for fork(2)

Hi hackers. Today I want to write about a new functionality that I've been developing for MoarVM that has very little to do with the JIT compiler. But it is still about VM internals so I guess it will fit.

Many months ago, jnthn wrote a blog post on the relation between perl 5 and perl 6. And as a longtime and enthusiastic perl 5 user - most of the JIT's compile time support software is written in perl 5 for a reason - I wholeheartedly agree with the 'sister language' narrative. There is plenty of room for all sorts of perls yet, I hope. Yet one thing kept itching me:

Moreover, it’s very much the case that Perl 5 and Perl 6 make different trade-offs. To pick one concrete example, Perl 6 makes it easy to run code across multiple threads, and even uses multiple threads internally (for example, performing optimization and JIT compilation on a background thread). Which is great…except the only winning move in a game involving both threads and fork() is not to play. Sometimes one just can’t have their cake and eat it, and if you’re wanting a language that more directly gives you your POSIX, that’s probably always going to be a strength of Perl 5 over Perl 6.

(Emphasis mine). You see, I had never realized that MoarVM couldn't implement fork(), but it's true. In POSIX systems, a fork()'d child process inherits the full memory space, as-is, from its parent process. But it inherits only the forking thread. This means that any operations performed by any other thread, including operations that might need to be protected by a mutex (e.g. malloc()), will be interrupted and unfinished (in the child process). This can be a problem. Or, in the words of the linux manual page on the subject:

       *  The child process is created with a single thread—the one that
          called fork().  The entire virtual address space of the parent is
          replicated in the child, including the states of mutexes,
          condition variables, and other pthreads objects; the use of
          pthread_atfork(3) may be helpful for dealing with problems that
          this can cause.

       *  After a fork() in a multithreaded program, the child can safely
          call only async-signal-safe functions (see signal-safety(7)) until
          such time as it calls execve(2).

Note that the set of signal-safe functions is not that large, and excludes all memory management functions. As noted by jnthn, MoarVM is inherently multithreaded from startup, and will happily spawn as many threads as needed by the program. It also uses malloc() and friends rather a lot. So it would seem that perl 6 cannot implement POSIX fork() (in which both parent and child program continue from the same position in the program) as well as perl 5 can.

I was disappointed. As a longtime (and enthusiastic) perl 5 user, fork() is one of my favorite concurrency tools. Its best feature is that parent and child processes are isolated by the operating system, so each can modify its own internal state without concern for concurrency,. This can make it practical to introduce concurrency after development, rather than designing it in from the start. Either process can crash while the other continues. It is also possible (and common) to run a child process with reduced privileges relative to the parent process, which isn't possible with threads. And it is possible to prepare arbitrarily complex state for the child process, unlike spawn() and similar calls.

Fortunately all hope isn't necessarily lost. The restrictions listed above only apply if there are multiple threads active at the moment that fork() is executed. That means that if we can stop all threads (except for the one planning to fork) before actually calling fork(), then the child process can continue safely. That is well within the realm of possibility, at least as far as system threads are concerned.

The process itself isn't very exciting to talk about, actually - it involves sending stop signals to system threads, waiting for these threads to join, verifying that the forking thread is the really only active thread, and restarting threads after fork(). Because of locking, it is a bit subtle (tbere may be another user thread that is also trying to fork), but not actually very hard. When I finally merged the code, it turned out that an ancient (and forgotten) thread list modification function was corrupting the list by not being aware of generational garbage collection... oops. But that was simple enough to fix (thanks to timotimo++ for the hint).

And now the following oneliner should work on platforms that support fork():(using development versions of MoarVM and Rakudo):

perl6 -e 'use nqp; my $i = nqp::fork(); say $i;'

The main limitation of this work is that it won't work if there are any user threads active. (If there are any, nqp::fork() will throw an exception). The reason why is simple: while it is possible to adapt the system threads so that I can stop them on demand, user threads may be doing arbitrary work, hold arbitrary locks and may be blocked (possibly indefinitely) on a system call. So jnthn's comment at the start of this post still applies - threads and fork() don't work together.

In fact, many programs may be better off with threads. But I think that languages in the perl family should let the user make that decision, rather than the VM. So I hope that this will find some use somewhere. If not, it was certainly fun to figure out. Happy hacking!


PS: For the curious, I think there may in fact be a way to make fork() work under a multithreaded program, and it relies on the fact that MoarVM has a multithreaded garbage collector. Basically, stopping all threads before calling fork() is not so different from stopping the world during the final phase of garbage collection. And so - in theory - it would be possible to hijack the synchronization mechanism of the garbage collector to pause all threads. During interpretation, and in JIT compiled code, each thread periodically checks if garbage collection has started. If it has, it will synchronize with the thread that started GC in order to share the work. Threads that are currently blocked (on a system call, or on acquiring a lock) mark themselves as such, and when they are resumed always check the GC status. So it is in fact possible to force MoarVM into a single active thread even with multiple user threads active. However, that still leaves cleanup to deal with, after returning from fork() in the child process. Also, this will not work if a thread is blocked on NativeCall. Altogether I think abusing the GC in order to enable a fork() may be a bit over the edge of insanity :-)