Windows, mirrors and a sense of self

In my previous post, Threading for humans, I ended with a brief look at TLS, thread-local storage. Given its prominent position in SQLOS, I’d like to take you on a deeper dive into TLS, including some x64 implementation details. Far from being a dry subject, this gets interesting when you look at how TLS helps to support the very abstraction of a thread, as well as practical questions like how cleanly any/or efficiently SQLOS encapsulates mechanisms peculiar to Windows on Intel, or for that matter Windows as opposed to Linux.
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Threading for humans

I used to think of threading as a complicated subject that everybody except me had a grip on. Turns out that it’s actually simple stuff with complicated repercussions, and no, many people don’t really get it, so I was in good company all along. Because I’m heading into some SQLOS thread internals, this is a good time to take stock and revisit a few fundamentals. This will be an idiosyncratic explanation, and one that ignores many complexities inside the black box – CPU internals, the added abstraction of a hypervisor, and programming constructs like thread pooling and tasks – for the sake of focusing on functionality directly exposed to the lower levels of software.
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Anatomy and psychology of a SQLOS spinlock

SQL Server spinlocks are famously elusive little beasties, tending to stay in the shadows except when they come out to bother you in swarms. I’m not going to add to the documentation of where specific spinlock types show up, or how to respond to contention on different types; the interested reader likely already knows where to look. Hint: Chris Adkin is quite the spinlock exterminator of the day.

In preparation for Bob Ward’s PASS Summit session, I figured it would make sense to familiarise myself a bit more with spinlock internals, since I have in the past found it frustrating to try and get a grip on it. Fact is, these are actually simple structures that are easy to understand, and as usual, a few public symbols go a long way. Being undocumented stuff, the usual caveats apply that one should not get too attached to implementation details.

Spinlock structure

It doesn’t get any simpler. A SQLOS spinlock is just a four-byte integer, embedded as a member variable in various classes, with two states:

  • Not acquired – the value is zero
  • Acquired – the value is the Windows thread ID of the owner

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