Task: Thread Synchronization

You will find a multi-threaded program in the upstream repository without any synchronization. Your task is to add correct and proper synchronization to make the program run flawlessly.
If you don’t know where and how to start, look at the help section below. While implementing, make sure to read the comments found in the assignment code, and if anything is unclear, come back to this Wiki.

Main Idea

This time, we provide a framework for A day of work in a Ski School. The central roles in this scenario are:

Students – aim to improve the skiing while attending a ski course.
SkiInstructors – waiting for students to teach them to ski better.

The student decides if they want to take the beginner coures or the advanced personal course. The workflow then branches as follows:

Beginner Ski Course

Every student waits in the waiting queue until a ski instructor selects the student for the course.
Once the instructor is assigned, every student must wait for the instructor to create a progress report instance before the course can start.
After the course, the instructor enters the rating, and no student should leave before receiving their updated progress report.
Ski instructors responsible for beginner courses periodically check, at their own pace, if there is a student waiting.
No dedicated mechanism is expected here! It is also expected that they take breaks if there is nothing to do!

Advanced Personal Ski Course

Students should wait for the ski slope to be cleared (slope_clear) before they begin searching for an available personal ski instructor.
Before the advanced course can start, the instructor creates the progress report instance for the assigned student.
After the advanced course, the instructor enters the rating, and only after receiving the rating the student should leave.
Advanced Course ski instructors are expected to work only on demand – implement a dedicated synchronization mechanism for that!
Some students decide to randomly go for a run on the steepest slope of the resort to test their newly learned skills.
Make sure to handle synchronization and performance while following the hints in the codebase.

Ensure that the provided comments and hints in the code are followed, and achieve the described workflow using only synchronization primitives.

Task

Identify all actors and resources in the programs.
You need to ensure that the resources are acquired safely.
Think about potential data races and deadlock scenarios.
Use synchronization primitives correctly to make access to all shared resources thread-safe.
All shared resources must be accessed by only one thread at a time!
The individual tasks are built to encourage the usage of at least one mutex, one semaphore, and one condition variable. Strongly think about which locking principles make the most sense in which situations.
Notice the marked TODO fields and which files are not to be modified.
Make sure to read the code as well as the function headers carefully.

Test your programs multiple times and with numerous parameters to find possible threading errors. Threading errors tend to crash programs/produce incorrect output very irregularly and are sometimes hard to reproduce.
Follow the “divide and conquer” principle and take a modular approach to the implementation. Start by implementing the beginner course part first, then move on to advanced personal course without letting the instructors take a break and excluding the steep slope run possibility. Once this works gradually add more options.

If you take a look at the header file testing_defines.h, you will be able to easily adjust the number of threads or activate, deactivate and randomize some parts of the code!

Building

In-source building:

cd A2/
make all
make run

Notice that an executable titled ski_day has been created in the folder you called make all in.
You can now start the program by executing:

./ski_day num_students num_instructors

Common Problems

This task is about locking. Do not wrap your head around different edge cases. Only make sure every shared resource is correctly locked.
Avoid potential deadlocks! Locks have to be locked in the same order.
Do not unlock a mutex multiple times, do not destroy a locked mutex, and especially do not unlock a mutex from a thread not owning it. Consider scenarios that lead to undefined behavior! (check out the man page)
You don’t have to change the cancellation state and/or type of any thread!
Use assert statements to check the return values of the pthread_* and sem_* functions to catch wrong usage!

General Notes

You are responsible only for locking. Do not change the program logic (except an if/while loop directly related to a synchronization primitive)!
==> Do not observe the codebase as an optimization or improvement opportunity. Instead, consider it a runway where you must make everything work correctly using only the learned synchronization primitives.
No new non-synchronization variables, code modifications, or reorganizations are allowed.
Timeout is a good sign for deadlock, lost signals, or overlocking. Make sure you don’t introduce any of these problems in your program.
You have a free choice of synchronization primitives. We don’t restrict you anywise, but only encourage you to use all those mentioned in the lecture as the goal of this task is to get familiar with them.
Ideally do not push any custom debug messages!
Make sure printf messages indicating an illogical program flow do not get printed! (e.g. “[ OOOPS ] Slow down Student %zd! The slope has not been cleared yet!“).
Ensure that the message “[ LIFT CLOSED ] !! No major accidents/crashes happened on the ski day!!" is the very last that appears in stdout!

Help

The spirit of this course is that you should learn to look up technical concepts and implement practical tasks by yourself. However, here is some help in case you get lost:

Most important resource:
Manual pages for the pthreads (POSIX threads) functions

man pthreads
man pthread_mutex_lock
man pthread_cond_wait
man <...>

If you need a rough overview of the pthread library and how to lock correctly, make sure to check out the pthread tutorial (PDF) by Peter C. Chapin. It contains a lot of information you might need for the first and second assignments.

Note: If you get an error while trying to open the manual pages for pthread_mutex_lock, you can install the glibc-doc (sudo apt-get install glibc-doc) package to fix the issue.

Some Important Concepts

Always look up the function you use in their man pages. They will tell you how each function behaves in much more detail.

Semaphore

Holds an integer value that can be increased and decreased by threads.

A fixed amount of threads can enter.
It puts the calling thread to sleep when it wants to decrease the value and has reached 0 or less.
Sleeping threads are woken up when another thread increases the value.
Datatype: sem_t
Popular functions: sem_init, sem_destroy, sem_wait, sem_post
See also: https://linux.die.net/man/7/sem_overview

Mutex

Primitive that can be used to make sure only one thread accesses critical sections of code simultaneously.

Only one thread can enter.
It can be locked and unlocked.
If a thread tries to lock an already locked mutex, it is put to sleep until the mutex is unlocked by the thread that currently has it locked.
A mutex applies the same concept as a semaphore with the values 0 or 1.
Datatype: pthread_mutex_t
Popular functions: pthread_mutex_init, pthread_mutex_destroy, pthread_mutex_lock, pthread_mutex_unlock
See also: https://hpc-tutorials.llnl.gov/posix/

Condition Variable

Primitive that can be used to put threads to sleep and wake them up from other threads.

A CV is ideal for many cases where one thread needs to wait for the result of some processing in another thread.
They are always protected by an accompanying mutex.
Datatype: pthread_cond_t
Popular functions: pthread_cond_init, pthread_cond_destroy, pthread_cond_wait, pthread_cond_signal, pthread_cond_broadcast
See also: https://hpc-tutorials.llnl.gov/posix/

Submission

Modify the files in your git repository. You can find this assignment’s files in the A2 directory.

Tag the submission with A2 and push it to the server. You may remove and re-push the A2 tag any time you like before the deadline.

Assignment Tutors

If you have any questions regarding this assignment, go to Discord and read through the SLP channels. The probability that your question was already answered or some discussions will lead you in the right direction is quite high. If not so, just create a new thread with the A2 flair applied.

If you have a more direct question regarding your specific solution, you can also ask the tutors who organize this assignment:

Lorenz Pretterhofer, lorenz.pretterhofer@tugraz.at
Michael Ladstätter, mladstaetter@student.tugraz.at