Fred / Libfibre
Fred / Libfibre is an M:N user-level threading runtime without preemption, thus the term fibre. It demonstrably supports massive session concurrency in network/cloud servers with minimal overhead.
Running make all builds the fibre library in src/libfibre.so along with several example/test programs: test1, ordering, threadtest, echotest, and webserver in the subdirectory apps.
The build process should download all git submodules.
If that fails, download manually using git submodule update --init --recursive.
Running make doc builds documentation in doc/html/index.html.
Both Linux/epoll and FreeBSD/kqueue are supported, but significantly more testing has been done for Linux/epoll.
Results
The runtime system has been described and evaluated in our Sigmetrics 2020 paper User-level Threading: Have Your Cake and Eat It Too. In this paper, it has been named Fred to satsify anonymity requirements during peer review - and to distinguish it from other user-level threading runtimes.
Contributors
The runtime has originally been developed in close collaboration with Saman Barghi.
In addition, the following students (in alphabetical order) have helped with various parts of Libfibre:
- Qin An (FreeBSD/kqueue)
- Bilal Akhtar (gdb extension)
- Peter Cai (idle manager, bug fixes)
- Zhaocheng Che (on-demand oneshot polling)
- Peng Chen (split stack)
- Bryant Curto (bug fixes)
- Peiran Hong (API/Apache)
- Matthew May (MCS queue with timeout)
- Vrajang Parikh (gdb names & watchpoints)
- Wen Shi (gdb extension)
- Kai Sun (ARM64, mutex locks)
- JinYang (Luke) Tao (LTTng)
- Shuangyi Tong (event scopes)
- Gan Wang (API/Apache)
- Xinyi Zhou (worker/core affinity)
- Zhenyan Zhu (std::thread using fibre)
All bugs are mine though. ;-)
License
Libfibre is currently distributed under the GNU GPL license, although this could change in the future. See LICENSE for details.
Feedback / Questions
Please send any questions or feedback to mkarsten|at|uwaterloo.ca.