las3_pub / predictable_parallel_patterns

It is now possible to use a memory mapped stack that throws a SIGSEV if thes coroutine stacks are exhausted.

Remove the strict static memory allocation scheme in favour of placing objects on the heap at startup. This still keeps the requirements posed for modern, high performance embedded systems, but makes APIs a lot cleaner.

The cas size could exceed an unsigned long, so we use the correct cas_integer type for the traded_cas_field representations.

We fixed the bug in tsan causing it to crash after creating/deleting many fibers, because of that there is no need for this cache mechanism (you have to use the most recent clang build with the patch for it to work thought).

We yield after num_thread failed steals in a row. This parameter can be tuned for better performance, but we stick to a sensible default just to prevent massive spinning.

Tsan does not cope well with rapidely destroyed/created fibers. As it is currently too much effort to fully investigate the tsan issue we work around it by caching the shourt lived fibers based on their stack base address. This allows us to use thread sanitizer for now.

Older CMAKE versions wont work with export targets in different directories. For now we simply add the context_switcher manually to the export target of pls.

We still see very sporadic crashes, however the current version is at least a starting point for refactoring and debugging. Next steps have to be to re-enable tooling support (i.e. add code to let sanitizers do their work).

The current version has race conditions and is hard to debug (especially because of the fibers, if a wrong thread executes on a fiber we get segfalts very fast). To combat this mess we now refactor the code bit by bit while also adding tests where it can be done with reasonably effort).

The project is currently really messy and there are sporadic sigsevs. This indicates that we still have a race in our code. Thread Sanitizer does not work with our current implementation, as it needs annotations for fibers.

The next step is to clean up the project and maybe add thread sanitizer support to our fiber implementation. This should help finding the remaining bugs.

The deque trades tasks when stealing. Right now only the fast local path is tested and implemented. For the next step to work we also need to add the resource stack and resource tarding to the system.

The current state shows the minimum actions taken to execute a parallel call: get the thread local, find the active frame, execute on the next frame and return to the active frame.

The rationale to do an custom implementation is that the existing solutions are quite a bit slower and/or require more memory.

The basic calling works, next we measure on both x86 and arm and then decide on how we implement our fiber/'staggered stack' abstraction.

We now cover all implementations that have a chance of being fast.
ARM implementations for our 'fast fiber call' are still missing. After we add them we decide on how to proceed.

We implement a minimal concepts of user level threads. This shows the minimum requirements for our 'staggered' stack implementation: we need to be able to switch to a new stack and allow someone else to continue the calling function right before the switch.

The idea is to exclude as many sources as possible that could lead to issues with contention and cache misses. After some experimentation, we think that hyperthreading is simply not working very well with our kind of workload. In the future we might simply test on other hardware.