index-pack: fix race condition with duplicate bases

When we are resolving deltas in an indexed pack, we do it by
first selecting a potential base (either one stored in full
in the pack, or one created by resolving another delta), and
then resolving any deltas that use that base.  When we
resolve a particular delta, we flip its "real_type" field
from OBJ_{REF,OFS}_DELTA to whatever the real type is.

We assume that traversing the objects this way will visit
each delta only once. This is correct for most packs; we
visit the delta only when we process its base, and each
object (and thus each base) appears only once. However, if a
base object appears multiple times in the pack, we will try
to resolve any deltas based on it once for each instance.

We can detect this case by noting that a delta we are about
to resolve has already had its real_type field flipped, and
we already do so with an assert().  However, if multiple
threads are in use, we may race with another thread on
comparing and flipping the field. We need to synchronize the
access.

The right mechanism for doing this is a compare-and-swap (we
atomically "claim" the delta for our own and find out
whether our claim was successful). We can implement this
in C by using a pthread mutex to protect the operation. This
is not the fastest way of doing a compare-and-swap; many
processors provide instructions for this, and gcc and other
compilers provide builtins to access them. However, some
experiments showed that lock contention does not cause a
significant slowdown here. Adding c-a-s support for many
compilers would increase the maintenance burden (and we
would still end up including the pthread version as a
fallback).

Note that we only need to touch the OBJ_REF_DELTA codepath
here. An OBJ_OFS_DELTA object points to its base using an
offset, and therefore has only one base, even if another
copy of that base object appears in the pack (we do still
touch it briefly because the setting of real_type is
factored out of resolve_data).

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions