Skip to content

ARC: shard the weak-reference table - #401

Open
DTW-Thalion wants to merge 1 commit into
gnustep:masterfrom
DTW-Thalion:arc-weak-table-sharding
Open

ARC: shard the weak-reference table#401
DTW-Thalion wants to merge 1 commit into
gnustep:masterfrom
DTW-Thalion:arc-weak-table-sharding

Conversation

@DTW-Thalion

@DTW-Thalion DTW-Thalion commented Jul 23, 2026

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Contributor

The weak-reference table took a single global lock, so weak operations on unrelated objects serialised on one mutex and scaled negatively with core count.

The striping now lives inside the table type rather than at its call sites: WeakRefTable holds an array of independently locked stripes, picks one from the object address, and keeps the operations it offered before, so nothing outside it knows the table is striped at all. The stripe count is a build flag or the OBJC_WEAK_SHARD_COUNT environment variable.

Three things the striping needed in its own right: the stripe a block belongs to is fixed when the block is created, which closes a lock-selection race that showed up as a use-after-free under AddressSanitizer with more than one stripe; a block's weak slot is accessed atomically, so the striping also holds on weakly ordered targets, checked under ThreadSanitizer; and a block is recycled within its own stripe.

#399 has merged, so the diff here is this change alone.

@davidchisnall

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Member

This looks more invasive than it should be. The original refactoring to make the type used for a weak ref table distinct was intended to make it easy to provide a replacement that did the sharding internally.

@DTW-Thalion
DTW-Thalion force-pushed the arc-weak-table-sharding branch from ff83926 to 79eb446 Compare July 24, 2026 13:01
@DTW-Thalion
DTW-Thalion marked this pull request as ready for review July 28, 2026 01:27
@DTW-Thalion
DTW-Thalion force-pushed the arc-weak-table-sharding branch from 79eb446 to ddc3ebc Compare July 28, 2026 03:23
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Labels

None yet

Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

2 participants