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+Process Management Optimizations
+================================
+
+Problems
+--------
+
+Early versions of the SMP support for the runtime system completely
+relied on locking in order to protect data accesses from multiple
+threads. In some cases this isn't that problematic, but in some cases
+it really is. It complicates the code, ensuring all locks needed are
+actually held, and ensuring that all locks are acquired in such an
+order that no deadlock occur. Acquiring locks in the right order often
+also involve releasing locks held, forcing threads to reread data
+already read. A good recipe for creation of bugs. Trying to use more
+fine-grained locking in order to increase possible parallelism in the
+system makes the complexity situation even worse. Having to acquire a
+bunch of locks when doing operations also often cause heavy lock
+contention which cause poor scalability.
+
+Management of processes internally in the runtime system suffered from
+these problems. When changing state on a process, for example from
+`waiting` to `runnable`, a lock on the process needed to be
+locked. When inserting a process into a run queue also a lock
+protecting the run queue had to be locked. When migrating a process
+from one run queue to another run queue, locks on both run queues and
+on the process had to be locked.
+
+This last example is a quite common case in during normal
+operation. For example, when a scheduler thread runs out of work it
+tries to steal work from another scheduler threads run queue. When
+searching for a victim to steal from there was a lot of juggling of
+run queue locks involved, and during the actual theft finalized by
+having to lock both run queues and the process. When one scheduler
+runs out of work, often others also do, causing lots of lock
+contention.
+
+Solution
+--------
+
+### Process ###
+
+In order to avoid these situations we wanted to be able to do most of
+the fundamental operations on a process without having to acquire a
+lock on the process. Some examples of such fundamental operations are,
+moving a process between run queues, detecting if we need to insert it
+into a run queue or not, detecting if it is alive or not.
+
+All of this information in the process structure that was needed by
+these operations was protected by the process `status` lock, but the
+information was spread across a number of fields. The fields used was
+typically state fields that could contain a small number of different
+states. By reordering this information a bit we could *easily* fit
+this information into a 32-bit wide field of bit flags (only 12-flags
+were needed). By moving this information we could remove five 32-bit
+wide fields and one pointer field from the process structure! The move
+also enabled us to easily read and change the state using atomic
+memory operations.
+
+### Run Queue ###
+
+As with processes we wanted to be able to do the most fundamental
+operations without having to acquire a lock on it. The most important
+being able to determine if we should enqueue a process in a specific
+run queue or not. This involves being able to read actual load, and
+load balancing information.
+
+The load balancing functionality is triggered at repeated fixed
+intervals. The load balancing more or less strives to even out run
+queue lengths over the system. When balancing is triggered,
+information about every run queue is gathered, migrations paths and
+run queue length limits are set up. Migration paths and limits are
+fixed until the next balancing has been done. The most important
+information about each run queue is the maximum run queue length since
+last balancing. All of this information were previously stored in the
+run queues themselves.
+
+When a process has become runnable, for example due to reception of a
+message, we need to determine which run queue to enqueue it
+in. Previously this at least involved locking the run queue that the
+process currently was assigned to while holding the status lock on the
+process. Depending on load we sometimes also had to acquire a lock on
+another run queue in order to be able to determine if it should be
+migrated to that run queue or not.
+
+In order to be able to decide which run queue to use without having to
+lock any run queues, we moved all fixed balancing information out of
+the run queues into a global memory block. That is, migration paths
+and run queue limits. Information that need to be frequently updated,
+like for example maximum run queue length, were kept in the run queue,
+but instead of operating on this information under locks we now use
+atomic memory operations when accessing this information. This made it
+possible to first determine which run queue to use, without locking
+any run queues, and when decided, lock the chosen run queue and insert
+the process.
+
+#### Fixed Balancing Information ####
+
+When determining which run queue to choose we need to read the fixed
+balancing information that we moved out of the run queues. This
+information is global, read only between load balancing operations,
+but will be changed during a load balancing. We do not want to
+introduce a global lock that needs to be acquired when accessing this
+information. A reader optimized rwlock could avoid some of the
+overhead since the data is most frequently read, but it would
+unavoidably cause disruption during load balancing, since this
+information is very frequently read. The likelihood of a large
+disruption due to this also increase as number of schedulers grows.
+
+Instead of using a global lock protecting modifications of this
+information, we write a completely new version of it at each load
+balancing. The new version is written in another memory block than the
+previous one, and published by issuing a write memory barrier and then
+storing a pointer to the new memory block in a global variable using
+an atomic write operation.
+
+When schedulers need to read this information, they read the pointer
+to currently used information using an atomic read operation, and then
+issue a data dependency read barrier, which on most architectures is a
+no-op. That is, it is very little overhead getting access to this
+information.
+
+Instead of allocating and deallocating memory blocks for the different
+versions of the balancing information we keep old memory blocks and
+reuse them when it is safe to do so. In order to be able to determine
+when it is safe to reuse a block we use the thread progress
+functionality, ensuring that no threads have any references to the
+memory block when we reuse it.
+
+#### Be Less Aggressive ####
+
+We implemented a test version using lock free run queues. This
+implementation did however not perform as good as the version using
+one lock per run queue. The reason for this was not investigated
+enough to say why this was. Since the locked version performed better
+we kept it, at least for now. The lock free version, however, forced
+us to use other solutions, some of them we kept.
+
+Previously when a process that was in a run queue got suspended, we
+removed it from the queue straight away. This involved locking the
+process, locking the run queue, and then unlinking it from the double
+linked list implementing the queue. Removing a process from a lock
+free queue gets really complicated. Instead, of removing it from the
+queue, we just leave it in the queue and mark it as suspended. When
+later selected for execution we check if the process is suspended, if
+so just dropped it. During its time in the queue, it might also get
+resumed again, if so execute it when it get selected for execution.
+
+By keeping this part when reverting back to a locked implementation,
+we could remove a pointer field in each process structure, and avoid
+unnecessary operations on the process and the queue which might cause
+contention.
+
+### Combined Modifications ###
+
+By combining the modifications of the process state management and the
+run queue management, we can do large parts of the work involved when
+managing processes with regards to scheduling and migration without
+having any locks locked at all. In these situations we previously had
+to have multiple locks locked. This of course caused a lot of rewrites
+across large parts of the runtime system, but the rewrite both
+simplified code and eliminated locking at a number of places. The
+major benefit is, of course, reduced contention.
+
+### A Benchmark Result ###
+
+When running the chameneosredux benchmark, schedulers frequently run
+out of work trying to steal work from each other. That is, either
+succeeding in migrating, or trying to migrate processes which is a
+scenario which we wanted to optimize. By the introduction of these
+improvements, we got a speedup of 25-35% when running this benchmark
+on a relatively new machine with an Intel i7 quad core processor with
+hyper-threading using 8 schedulers.
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