Back to Blog

OCaml Multicore - July 2021

Welcome to the July 2021 Multicore OCaml monthly report! This month's update along with the previous updates has been compiled by me, @ctk21, @kayceesrk and @shakthimaan. As August is usually a period of downtime in Europe, the next update may be merged with the September one in a couple of months (but given our geographically diverse nature now, if enough progress happens in August I'll do an update).

The overall status of the multicore efforts are right on track: our contributions to the next OCaml release have been incorporated in 4.13.0~alpha2, and our focus remains on crushing incompatibilities and bugs to generate domains-only parallelism patches suitable for upstream review and release. As a lower priority activity, we continue to develop the experimental "effects-based" IO stack, which will feature in the upcoming virtual OCaml Workshop at ICFP in August 2021.

The 4.12.0+domains trees continue to see a tail of bugs being steadily fixed. After last month's call, we saw a number of external contributors step up to submit fixes in addition to the multicore and core OCaml teams. We would like to acknowledge and thank them!

  • @emillon (Etienne Millon) for running the Jane Street core v0.14 test suite with 4.12.0+domains and sharing the test results (and finding a multicore GC edge case bug while at it).
  • @Termina1 (Vyacheslav Shebanov) for testing the compilation of batteries 3.30 with Multicore OCaml 4.12.0+domains.
  • @nbecker (Nils Becker) for reporting on parallel_map and parallel_scan for domainslib.
  • Filip Koprivec for identifying a memory leak when using flush_all with ocamlc with 4.12.0+domains.

All of these fixes, combined with some big-ticket compatibility changes (listed below) are getting me pretty close to using 4.12.0+domains as my daily OCaml opam switch of choice. I encourage you to also give it a try and report (good or bad) results on the multicore OCaml tracker. If these sorts of problems grab your attention, then Segfault Systems is hiring in India to work with @kayceesrk and the team there on multicore OCaml.

For benchmarking, the Jupyter notebooks for the Sandmark nightly benchmark runs have been updated, and we continue to test the Sandmark builds for the 4.12+ variants and 4.14.0+trunk. Progress has been made to integrate current-bench OCurrent pipeline with the Sandmark 2.0 -alpha branch changes to reproduce the current Sandmark functionality, which will allow GitHub PRs to be benchmarked systematically before being merged.

As always, the Multicore OCaml ongoing and completed tasks are listed first, which are then followed by the updates from the Ecosystem libraries. The Sandmark nightly build efforts, benchmarking updates and relevant current-bench tasks are then mentioned. Finally, the update on the upstream OCaml Safepoints PR is provided for your reference.

Multicore OCaml

Ongoing

CI Compatibility

  • ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore#602 Inclusion of most of OCaml headers results in requiring pthread

    The inclusion of multiple nested header files requires pthread and the decompress testsuite fails.

  • ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore#607 caml_young_end is not a value * anymore

    An inconsistency observed in the CI where caml_young_end is now a char * instead of value *.

Crashes

Package Builds

  • ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore#609 lablgtk's example segfaults

    An ongoing effort to compile lablgtk with OCaml and Multicore OCaml.

  • ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore#624 core v0.14: test triggers a segfault in the GC

    A segfault caused by running core.v0.14 test suite with Multicore OCaml 4.12.0+domains as reported by @emillon.

  • ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore#625 Cannot compile batteries on OCaml Multicore 4.12.0+domains

    An effort by Vyacheslav Shebanov (@Termina1) to compile batteries.3.30 with Multicore OCaml 4.12.0+domains variant.

Upstream

  • ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore#573 Backport trunk safepoints PR to multicore

    The Safepoints implementation is being backported to Multicore OCaml. The initial test results of running Sandmark on a large Xen2 box are shown below:

OCaml-Multicore-PR-573-Time|458x500 OCaml-Multicore-PR-573-Speedup|458x500

  • ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore#617 Some of the compatibility macros are not placed in the same headers as in upstream OCaml

    The introduction of a compatibility layer for GC statistics need to be consistent with trunk.

  • ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore#618 Review io.c for thread-safety and add parallel tests

    The thread-safety fixes in io.c requires a review and additional tests need to be added for the same.

  • ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore#623 Exposing caml_channel_mutex_* hooks

    A draft PR to support caml_channel_mutex_* interfaces from trunk to Multicore OCaml.

Sundries

Completed

Enhancements

  • ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore#601 Domain better participants

    The 0(n_running_domains) from domain creation and the iterations 0(Max_domains) from STW signalling have been removed.

  • ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore#605 Eventog event for condition wait

    A new event has been added to indicate when a domain is blocked at Condition.wait. This is useful for debugging any imbalance in task distribution in domainslib.

OCaml-Multicore-PR-605-Illustration|536x500

Upstream

  • ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore#584 Modernise signal handling

    The Multicore OCaml signals implementation is now closer to that of upstream OCaml.

  • ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore#600 Expose a few more GC variables in headers

    The caml_young_start, caml_young_limit and caml_minor_heap_wsz variables have now been defined in the runtime.

  • ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore#612 Make intern and extern work with Multicore

    The upstream changes to intern and extern have now been incorporated to work with the Multicore OCaml runtime.

Fixes

  • ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore$604 Fix unguarded caml_skiplist_empty in caml_scan_global_young_roots

    A patch that fixes a locking bug with global roots observed on a Mac OS CI with parallel/join.ml.

  • ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore#621 otherlibs: encode_terminal_status does not set all fields

    A minor fix for the error caused when moved from using caml_initialize_field to caml_initialize in otherlibs.

  • ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore#628 In link_channel, channel->prev should be set to NULL

    A PR to fix the memory leak when using flush_all with ocamlc as reported by Filip Koprivec.

  • ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore#629 Backtrace last exn is val unit

    A fix for the crash reported on running core's test suite by clearing backtrace_last_exn to Val_unit in runtime/backtrace.c.

Ecosystem

Ongoing

  • ocaml-multicore/ocaml-uring#36 Update to cstruct 6.0.1

    ocaml-uring is now updated to use Cstruct.shiftv with the upgrade to cstruct.6.0.1.

  • ocaml-multicore/domainslib#37 parallel_map

    A request by @nbecker to provide a parallel_map function over arrays having the following signature:

    val parallel_map : Domainslib.Task.pool -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'a array -> 'b array

  • ocaml-multicore/domainslib#38 parallel_scan rejects arrays not larger than pool size

    An "index out of bounds" exception is thrown for Task.parallel_scan with arrays not larger than the pool size as reported by @nbecker.

Completed

  • ocaml-multicore/eventlog-tools#4 Add domain/condition_wait event

    The lib/consts.ml file in eventlog-tools now includes the domain/condition_wait event.

  • ocaml-multicore/domainslib#34 Fix initial value accounting in parallel_for_reduce

    The initial value of parallel_for_reduce has been fixed so as to not be accounted multiple times.

Eio

The eio library provides an effects-based parallel IO stack for Multicore OCaml.

Ongoing

  • ocaml-multicore/eio#68 WIP: Add eio_luv backend

    A work-in-progress to use luv that provides OCaml/Reason bindings to libuv for a cross-platform backend for eio.

Completed

  • ocaml-multicore/eio#62 Update to latest MDX to fix exception reporting

    Dune has been updated to 2.9 along with necessary changes for exception reporting with MDX.

  • ocaml-multicore/eio#63 Update README

    A documentation update specifying the following steps required to manually pin the effects version of ppxlib and ocaml-migrate-parsetree.

    opam switch create 4.12.0+domains+effects --repositories=multicore=git+https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/multicore-opam.git,default
opam pin add -yn ppxlib 0.22.0+effect-syntax
opam pin add -yn ocaml-migrate-parsetree 2.1.0+effect-syntax

  • ocaml-multicore/eio#64 Improvements to traceln

    Enhancements to traceln to make it an Effect along with changes to trace output and addition of tests.

  • ocaml-multicore/eio#65 Add Flow.read_methods for optimised reading

    The addition of read_methods in the Flow module as a faster alternative to reading into a buffer.

  • ocaml-multicore/eio#66 Allow cancelling waiting for a semaphore

    Update to lib_eio/semaphore.ml to allow cancel waiting for a semaphore.

  • ocaml-multicore/eio#67 Add more generic exceptions

    The inclusion of generic exceptions to avoid depending on backend-specific exceptions. The tests have also been updated.

Benchmarking

Sandmark Nightly

Ongoing

  • ocaml-bench/sandmark-nightly#4 Parallel notebook pausetimes graphing for navajo results throws an error

    The parallel Jupyter notebook for pausetimes throws a ValueError that needs to be investigated.

  • ocaml-bench/sandmark-nightly#5 Status of disabled benchmarks

    The alt-ergo, frama-c, and js_of_ocaml benchmark results that were disabled from the Jupyter notebooks have to be tested with recent versions of Multicore OCaml.

  • ocaml-bench/sandmark-nightly#6 Parallel scalability number on navajo look odd

    The parallel performance numbers on the navajo build server for scalability will need to be reviewed and the experiments repeated and validated.

  • ocaml-bench/sandmark-nightly#7 Use col_wrap as 3 instead of 5 in the normalised results in parallel notebook

    For better readability, it is recommended to use col_wrap as 3 in the normalised results in the parallel notebook.

  • ocaml-bench/sandmark-nightly#8 View results for a set of benchmarks in the nightly notebooks

    A feature request to filter benchmarks by name or by tags when used with Jupyter notebooks.

  • ocaml-bench/sandmark-nightly#9 Static HTML pages for the recent results

    The benchmark results from the most recent build runs should be used to generate static HTML reports for review and analysis.

Completed

  • ocaml-bench/sandmark-nightly#2 Timestamps are not sorted in the parallel_nightly notebook

    The listing of timestamps in the drop-down option is now sorted.

Sandmark-nightly-PR-2-Fix|307x313

Sandmark

Ongoing

  • ocaml-bench/sandmark#243 Add irmin tree benchmark

    A request to add the Irmin tree.ml benchmark to Sandmark, including necessary dependencies and data files.

  • ocaml-bench/sandmark#245 Add dune.2.9.0

    An update to dune.2.9.0 in order to build coq with Multicore OCaml on Sandmark.

  • ocaml-bench/sandmark#247 Sandmark breaks on OCaml 4.14.0+trunk

    The Sandmark build for OCaml 4.14.0+trunk needs to be resolved as we begin upstreaming more Multicore OCaml changes.

  • ocaml-bench/sandmark#248 coq fails to build

    The coq package is failing to build with 4.12.0+domains+effects with Sandmark on navajo server.

Completed

  • ocaml-bench/sandmark#233 Update pausetimes_multicore to fit with the latest Multicore changes

    The Multicore pausetimes have now been updated for the 4.12.0 upstream and 4.12.0 branches which now use the new Common Trace Format (CTF).

  • ocaml-bench/sandmark#235 Update selected benchmarks as a set for baseline benchmark

    You now have the option to only filter from the user selected variants in the Jupyter notebooks.

Sandmark-PR-235-Fix|690x77

  • ocaml-bench/sandmark#237 Run sandmark_nightly on a larger machine

    The Sandmark nightly builds now run on a 64+ core machine to benefit from the improvements to Domainslib.

  • ocaml-bench/sandmark#240 Add navajo specific parallel config.json file

    A navajo server-specific run_config.json file has been added to Sandmark to run Multicore parallel benchmarks.

  • ocaml-bench/sandmark#242 Add commentary on grammatrix

    A documentation update for the grammatrix benchmark on customised task distribution via channels and the use of parallel_for.

  • ocaml-bench/sandmark#244 Add chrt to pausetimes_multicore wrapper

    The use of chrt -r 1 in paramwrapper is required with pausetimes_multicore to use the taskset arguments.

  • ocaml-bench/sandmark#246 Add trunk build to CI

    The .drone.yml file has now been updated to include 4.14.0+stock trunk build for the CI.

current-bench

Ongoing

  • ocurrent/current-bench#117 Read stderr from the docker container

    We are able to run Sandmark-2.0 -alpha branch with current-bench now, and it is useful to view the error output when running with Docker containers.

  • ocurrent/current-bench#146 Replicate ocaml-bench-server setup

    A request to dynamically pass the Sandmark benchmark target commands to current-bench in order to create pipelines.

OCaml

Completed

  • ocaml/ocaml#10039 Safepoints

    The PR has been cherry-picked on 4.13 and finally merged with upstream OCaml.

We would like to thank all the OCaml users, developers and contributors in the community for their valuable time and support to the project. Stay safe and have a great summer if you are northern hemispherically based!

Acronyms

  • AFL: American Fuzzy Lop
  • CI: Continuous Integration
  • CTF: Common Trace Format
  • GC: Garbage Collector
  • GCC: GNU Compiler Collection
  • GTK: GIMP ToolKit
  • HTML: HyperText Markup Language
  • IO: Input/Output
  • OPAM: OCaml Package Manager
  • OS: Operating System
  • PR: Pull Request
  • STW: Stop The World