Monitors could be installed but never taken down. That gap was about to
bite: the gen_server call timeout we want next is the Erlang dance —
monitor the server, wait for the reply or a Down or a deadline, then
demonitor — and without a way to remove a registration, every timed-out
call would leak a monitor on the server's slot and risk a stale Down
arriving later. So this lands the cleanup primitive before anything
depends on the old shape.
The decision flagged in the roadmap ("decide the monitor API NOW") is
resolved by giving each registration a process-unique MonitorId and
returning it to the caller. monitor() now hands back a
Monitor { id, target, rx } rather than a bare Receiver<Down>: read the
notice from rx as before, and pass &Monitor to demonitor to tear exactly
that registration down. The id comes from a monotonic counter in shared
state, bumped under the same lock that does the registration, so it's
deterministic and never reused — which is what lets demonitor name one of
several monitors on the same target unambiguously. target rode along on
the struct (over the sketched {id, rx}) purely so demonitor can go
straight to the slot instead of scanning every slot for the id.
demonitor returns Option<MonitorId> rather than a bool: Some(id) when a
live registration was found and removed, None when there was nothing left
to remove — it already fired (the registration is drained on finalize),
it was a NoProc, or the slot has been reclaimed. The generation half of
the pid quietly protects that last case: a recycled slot index fails
slot_mut's generation check, so a late demonitor is a clean no-op and can
never strip a different actor's monitor that happens to share the index.
The one piece of real care is reentrancy. Removing a registration drops
the slot's Sender, and Sender::drop can unpark a parked receiver, which
re-enters the shared mutex — which is not reentrant. So demonitor moves
the sender out of the Vec under the lock and lets it drop only after the
lock is released, the same discipline finalize_actor already follows for
its monitor and supervisor sends.
Flushing a Down the target already queued isn't a separate flag; it falls
out of dropping the Monitor. demonitor(&m); drop(m) stops future notices
and discards any queued one — the gen_server-call cleanup in one move.
Storage is now Vec<(MonitorId, Sender<Down>)>. The three slot-reset sites
were left alone on purpose: they clear/rebuild the Vec, which doesn't care
about the element type, so there's no fourth reset obligation. finalize
just destructures (_, m). Because chained_spawn and yield_many register no
monitors, that Vec stays empty on the hot path — taking an empty Vec costs
the same and the notify loop runs zero times — and a before/after general
probe confirmed both medians sit within noise.
Tests cover the three behaviours that matter: a demonitored watcher gets
no Down (its channel closes), demonitoring one of several leaves the
siblings firing normally, and demonitoring after the Down has already
fired reports None.
Add Erlang-style process links so an abnormal death fate-shares across a
link set, with trap_exit to convert that into a message instead.
- Slot.links: Vec<Pid>, bidirectional; reset in all three lifecycle sites.
- Actor.trap: Option<Sender<ExitSignal>>, fresh per spawn (a restarted
child starts un-trapped; no fourth reset site).
- link/unlink free functions on self_pid(); trap_exit() -> Receiver<ExitSignal>
(a dedicated inbox, distinct from the monitor Down channel).
- finalize_actor clears reverse links under the lock (always; keeps the
cascade acyclic), then propagates abnormal deaths post-lock: trapping peer
gets an ExitSignal message and survives, non-trapping peer is request_stop'd.
Normal exit never propagates. Dead-pid link delivers an immediate NoProc
(message if trapping, else request_stop(self) -- never a silent no-op).
- ExitSignal reuses DownReason and carries no panic payload (joiner-only).
Tests in tests/link.rs cover the propagate/trap/normal/dead-pid/unlink cases.
A cooperatively-cancelled actor that was sleeping (or in a bounded wait)
leaves its timer entry behind in the heap. The scheduler's shutdown
check required "no pending timers", so a single orphaned far-future
deadline kept the whole runtime alive until it fired — e.g. cancelling
an actor mid sleep(30s) hung run() for 30s.
A timer can only ever do useful work by waking a live actor, so once no
actors are live every remaining entry is orphaned by definition. Drop
the pending-timers condition from the shutdown check (live == 0 already
implies nothing a timer could wake) and clear the heap on the way out.
request_stop(pid) sets a per-actor flag and wakes a parked target. The
actor realizes the stop as a controlled unwind at its next observation
point (check!()/alloc via maybe_preempt, or the wakeup side of any
blocking park): a StopSentinel panic tears the stack down via the
trampoline's existing catch_unwind, running Drop, and is reported as the
new Outcome::Stopped (distinct from a user Panic).
Death surface kept distinct from Exit: Signal::Stopped(pid) +
DownReason::Stopped, so the supervisor await logic to come can tell a
requested stop apart from a self-termination.
Flag lives on Actor behind Arc<AtomicBool>; the scheduler resume path
takes a raw pointer into it (no per-resume refcount traffic), keeping
yield throughput at baseline.
`monitor(pid) -> Receiver<Down>` lets any actor watch any other and
receive a single Down{pid, reason} when it terminates. Generalizes the
existing single supervisor_channel (which is just a hard-wired monitor
the parent installs at spawn).
- src/monitor.rs: Down / DownReason{Exit,Panic,NoProc} + monitor().
Payload-free: a panic payload has one owner and goes to the joiner via
JoinError, so monitors learn only that it panicked. Monitoring an
already-gone pid yields NoProc immediately.
- runtime: Slot grows `monitors: Vec<Sender<Down>>`; finalize_actor
drains and notifies them outside the shared lock (send can unpark a
receiver, which re-takes the non-reentrant mutex). Cleared in
reclaim_slot and on slot reuse at spawn.
- Registration and finalize both serialize on the shared mutex, so a
target alive at registration always delivers a real Down (no race
between liveness check and registration).
tests/monitor.rs: Exit, Panic, NoProc-on-dead-target, and fan-out to
multiple monitors. Full suite green.
The single-scheduler hot path acquired the shared mutex three times per
yield: once to drain timers, once to drain IO completions, and once to pop
the next runnable actor. It also called Instant::now() every loop iteration
to feed timers.pop_due(), even though the pure-yield / pure-compute workloads
never arm a timer.
Confirmed with llmdbg before touching anything: breakpointing
switch_to_scheduler and instruction-counting one scheduler-side yield cycle on
the ctx_switch_probe showed ~6950 instructions / 68 calls of bookkeeping
between consecutive actor resumes, dominated by lock acquisition and the
per-iteration clock read — not by the naked-asm switch itself (~16 insns).
The te!() trace macro compiles to () without the smarm-trace feature, so it
was ruled out as a contributor.
This collapses the two drain `with_shared` calls into one lock hold and reads
the clock only when the timer heap is non-empty. IO completions are still
drained unconditionally while the IO subsystem is live, because the IO/pool
threads push completions onto their own mutex (not `shared`), so the scheduler
cannot know in advance whether any arrived — it must look; that look is a
single empty-VecDeque check on the hot path. No change to timer or IO
semantics; the asm switch is untouched.
Measured on this box (single core, nproc==1), medians over the bench harness,
re-baselined locally first:
yield_many smarm 1-thread 38459 -> 29943 us (-22.1%)
yield_in_hot_loop smarm 1-thread 166220 -> 122629 us (-26.2%)
ping_pong_oneshot smarm 1-thread 1619 -> 1367 us (-15.6%)
chained_spawn smarm 1-thread 481 -> 399 us (-17.0%)
Run-to-run spread on yield_many is ~3-4% (29565-30634), so the 22% move is
well outside the noise. Gap to tokio current_thread closes from ~2.4x to ~1.95x.
All tests green: cargo test --test context (4) plus the full suite (93 total).
While running benchmarks, a hang surfaced in timer-only workloads — actors
sleeping with no IO in flight. Tracing it down, the race lives in sleep():
between the call to `timers.insert_sleep` and the subsequent `park_current`
yield, the actor is still in State::Runnable. If the timer fires in that
window, the old code's `if matches!(slot.state, State::Parked)` guard silently
drops the wakeup. The actor then parks normally and never gets re-queued —
it sleeps forever.
The fix mirrors what scheduler::unpark() and the IO FdReady path already do:
when the timer fires and the slot is still Runnable, set `pending_unpark`
instead of re-queuing immediately. The upcoming Park yield sees the flag and
re-queues the actor rather than suspending it, closing the race without any
new synchronisation.
Adds a regression test: 100 actors doing pure timer sleeps across ≥2
scheduler threads. The test asserts both correctness (all actors complete)
and timeliness (wall time < 2×sleep duration), which is enough signal to
catch a stuck actor even on a single-core CI runner.
Three changes, each independently measured, landed together.
Fuse pre-resume mutex acquisitions
-----------------------------------
The schedule loop previously took the shared lock three separate times
per actor resume: once to pop the run queue, once to read the stack
pointer, and once to pop the first-resume closure. These are now a
single acquisition that returns everything needed to resume the actor.
As a side effect, pending_closures was changed from a Vec<(Pid, Closure)>
with O(n) linear scan to a Vec<Option<Closure>> indexed by slot index,
making first-closure lookup O(1).
Move stack allocation outside the shared lock
----------------------------------------------
Stack::new() (mmap + mprotect) was previously called inside with_shared,
stalling every other scheduler thread for the duration of two syscalls on
every spawn. It now runs before the lock is acquired.
Stack pool
----------
Rather than munmap-ing a stack when an actor finishes and mmap-ing a fresh
one on the next spawn, stacks are now recycled through a per-Runtime pool
(Mutex<Vec<Stack>>). finalize_actor extracts the stack from the Actor
before clearing the slot and pushes it to the pool outside the shared lock.
spawn_under pops from the pool before falling back to Stack::new().
The pool is unbounded for now (shrink policy TBD) but capped at
stack_pool_cap stacks on return, defaulting to thread_count * 4.
The cap is configurable via Config::stack_pool_cap(n).
Results (24-thread, against stored baseline)
--------------------------------------------
chained_spawn smarm 1-thread: 9763 → 261 µs (-97%)
chained_spawn smarm 24-thread: 23562 → 838 µs (-96%)
ping_pong_oneshot smarm 1-thread: 18409 → 742 µs (-96%)
ping_pong_oneshot smarm 24-thread: 44596 → 1425 µs (-97%)
catch_unwind_panics smarm 24-thread: 267812 → 124094 µs (-54%)
fan_out_compute smarm 24-thread: 2839 → 2226 µs (-22%)
Tokio regressions in the checker output are baseline measurement drift;
no tokio code was changed.
Add `Config::alloc_interval()` and `Config::timeslice_cycles()` so
callers can tune preemption sensitivity at runtime. The values flow
through `RuntimeInner` and are written into per-scheduler-thread locals
via a new `configure_preempt()` call at thread startup, keeping the hot
path free of cross-thread coherency traffic.
Fix unused-variable warnings in channel.rs by inlining `current_pid()`
directly into `te!` macro arguments — since the no-op macro arm never
evaluates its argument, no binding is needed at the call site.
Clean up a handful of dead imports exposed by the refactor.
smarm-dev