Basic thread blocking primitives for creating locks and other
synchronization classes.
This class associates, with each thread that uses it, a permit
(in the sense of the Semaphore
class). A call to park
will return immediately
if the permit is available, consuming it in the process; otherwise
it may block. A call to unpark
makes the permit
available, if it was not already available. (Unlike with Semaphores
though, permits do not accumulate. There is at most one.)
Methods park
and unpark
provide efficient
means of blocking and unblocking threads that do not encounter the
problems that cause the deprecated methods Thread.suspend
and Thread.resume
to be unusable for such purposes: Races
between one thread invoking park
and another thread trying
to unpark
it will preserve liveness, due to the
permit. Additionally, park
will return if the caller's
thread was interrupted, and timeout versions are supported. The
park
method may also return at any other time, for "no
reason", so in general must be invoked within a loop that rechecks
conditions upon return. In this sense park
serves as an
optimization of a "busy wait" that does not waste as much time
spinning, but must be paired with an unpark
to be
effective.
The three forms of park
each also support a
blocker
object parameter. This object is recorded while
the thread is blocked to permit monitoring and diagnostic tools to
identify the reasons that threads are blocked. (Such tools may
access blockers using method LockSupport.getBlocker(java.lang.Thread)
.) The use of these
forms rather than the original forms without this parameter is
strongly encouraged. The normal argument to supply as a
blocker
within a lock implementation is this
.
These methods are designed to be used as tools for creating
higher-level synchronization utilities, and are not in themselves
useful for most concurrency control applications. The park
method is designed for use only in constructions of the form:
while (!canProceed()) { ... LockSupport.park(this); }
where neither
canProceed
nor any other actions prior to the
call to
park
entail locking or blocking. Because only one
permit is associated with each thread, any intermediary uses of
park
could interfere with its intended effects.
Sample Usage. Here is a sketch of a first-in-first-out
non-reentrant lock class:
class FIFOMutex {
private final AtomicBoolean locked = new AtomicBoolean(false);
private final Queue<Thread> waiters
= new ConcurrentLinkedQueue<Thread>();
public void lock() {
boolean wasInterrupted = false;
Thread current = Thread.currentThread();
waiters.add(current);
// Block while not first in queue or cannot acquire lock
while (waiters.peek() != current ||
!locked.compareAndSet(false, true)) {
LockSupport.park(this);
if (Thread.interrupted()) // ignore interrupts while waiting
wasInterrupted = true;
}
waiters.remove();
if (wasInterrupted) // reassert interrupt status on exit
current.interrupt();
}
public void unlock() {
locked.set(false);
LockSupport.unpark(waiters.peek());
}
}