New implementation of BLACKHOLEs

This replaces the global blackhole_queue with a clever scheme that
enables us to queue up blocked threads on the closure that they are
blocked on, while still avoiding atomic instructions in the common
case.

Advantages:

 - gets rid of a locked global data structure and some tricky GC code
   (replacing it with some per-thread data structures and different
   tricky GC code :)

 - wakeups are more prompt: parallel/concurrent performance should
   benefit.  I haven't seen anything dramatic in the parallel
   benchmarks so far, but a couple of threading benchmarks do improve
   a bit.

 - waking up a thread blocked on a blackhole is now O(1) (e.g. if
   it is the target of throwTo).

 - less sharing and better separation of Capabilities: communication
   is done with messages, the data structures are strictly owned by a
   Capability and cannot be modified except by sending messages.

 - this change will utlimately enable us to do more intelligent
   scheduling when threads block on each other.  This is what started
   off the whole thing, but it isn't done yet (#3838).

I'll be documenting all this on the wiki in due course.

1 files changed, 18 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/rts/Messages.h b/rts/Messages.h
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..15c037954b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/rts/Messages.h
@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+/* ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
+ *
+ * (c) The GHC Team, 2010
+ *
+ * Inter-Capability message passing
+ *
+ * --------------------------------------------------------------------------*/
+
+BEGIN_RTS_PRIVATE
+
+nat messageBlackHole(Capability *cap, MessageBlackHole *msg);
+
+#ifdef THREADED_RTS
+void executeMessage (Capability *cap, Message *m);
+void sendMessage    (Capability *from_cap, Capability *to_cap, Message *msg);
+#endif
+
+END_RTS_PRIVATE