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ffi: the team handle owns its pool instead of building one per call (#333) - #344

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@shinaoka shinaoka commented Nov 9, 2026 •

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Closes #333.

What changed

faer#332 gave the C API a caller-owned handle, FaerV0_24_Team, but it carried only the width, so
every call ran faer::team::with_team, which builds a threadteam::Pool, reserves its members and
drops the pool again at the end of that call.

The handle now owns one threadteam::Pool:

  • libfaer_v0_23_team_create builds it once (a width of one is sequential and owns nothing),
  • every call moves the pool into a threadteam::Team, runs inside it, and moves it back out before
    returning (Team::with_par, faer-ffi/src/lib.rs:310),
  • libfaer_v0_23_team_set_threads is a setting on the owned object: it rebuilds the pool for the new
    width, and narrowing to one releases it (faer-ffi/src/lib.rs:292),
  • libfaer_v0_23_team_destroy drops it.

The C API surface is unchanged: same three functions, same signatures, same entry points taking
const FaerV0_24_Team *. NULL is still serial, and a caller that never calls create still gets
correct results.

Why not own a threadteam::Team

That would make a call allocate nothing at all, but threadteam 0.5 pins the thread that creates a
team to S[0] for the team's whole life (pin::TeamPin). A C caller's thread would then sit pinned
to one CPU between calls. The per-call into_team/into_pool keeps the caller outside the team, which
is the property the_team_handle_is_entered_per_call_and_left_again already observes through the
affinity mask.

What remains per call is threadteam's own reservation: one allocation (the id list) plus the affinity
syscalls of placing the leader for the call. Removing those needs a pool-lending API in threadteam,
which is an upstream change and out of scope here.

Lifetime rules

Written on libfaer_v0_23_team_create (faer-ffi/src/lib.rs:2715), and therefore in the committed,
regenerated faer-ffi/faer.h:

  • Two threads, one handle. An operation may be called on one handle from two threads at once as
    long as they write different elements. They do not run at once: the pool is a single object that
    one call holds for its duration, so the second waits (Team::with_par's mutex). A caller that wants
    its own threads to be parallel wants a handle per thread. This is the behavioural change of the
    issue; ffi: a caller-owned team handle instead of Par by value (#98) #332 documented the handle as shareable for reading.
  • set_threads and destroy are exclusive: no operation may be running on the handle, on any
    thread, while they are called.
  • After destroy the handle is gone: any later operation, set_threads or second destroy on
    that pointer is a use after free. destroy(NULL) is accepted and ignored.
  • A callback must not nest a parallel call. An operation called from inside another operation on
    the same thread (the SchurParams callbacks, for one) gets no team and runs sequentially. Handing it
    one would make it wait for the pool its own caller holds, and the mutex is not reentrant, so it
    would never return. Nesting is not parallel; it is correct.
  • fork without exec is not supported. A forked child inherits threadteam's process-wide worker
    cache and its mutex, so any handle there — the inherited one and a fresh one alike — can block on a
    lock the parent held, or on workers it does not have. Create handles in the process that uses them,
    and exec before using a team in a child whose parent already ran one.

Undecided (deliberately left open, no code): whether create should record the creator's pid and
refuse to work in a process it did not create the handle in. That would turn the fork case above from
"undefined, document exec" into a reported failure, but it adds a user-visible behaviour (a status or
an abort) to a boundary that currently has no error channel, so it wants an explicit decision rather
than a rider on this change.

Files

  • faer-ffi/src/lib.rs — the pool in Team, Team::{pool_for,set_threads,with_par}, the rewritten
    handle docs, the allocation probe and its test.
  • faer-ffi/faer.h — regenerated (FAER_FFI=1 cargo +nightly build -p faer-ffi); the doc changes
    above are what C callers read.
  • faer-ffi/Cargo.toml, Cargo.lock — faer-ffi names threadteam directly (four calls: build,
    into_team, exec, into_pool) instead of adding a pool-lending helper to faer::team, which
    would be new public Rust API for one consumer and is the pattern with_team's own docs recommend to
    a caller that owns a pool.
  • docs/worklogs/2026-11-09-ffi-team-pool.md — decisions, the rejected alternative, and what is not
    verified.
  • PATCHSET.md, docs/par-team-migration.md — the ledger row and the migration note for the handle.

Verification

# The acceptance test measures two shapes over the same number of calls in ONE run, so both see the
# same threadteam thread-cache state: one handle for 8 calls, then 8 handles of one call each. The
# first call of a pool is threadteam's first *acquisition* of it (it builds the members' own state),
# paid by the pool-per-call shape on every call; the reused handle's first call is therefore excluded
# and its tail compared with the whole of the other shape, as a sum so no single call's warm/cold
# state decides it.

# before this change (implementation reverted to origin/main, the new test kept): every call pays
width 4: per call on one handle [14072, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13] (tail 91), 8 handles of one call 112
thread 'tests::a_reused_handle_builds_its_pool_once' panicked:
  the tail of one handle cost 91 allocations against 112 for the same calls on a pool per call
test result: FAILED. 0 passed; 1 failed
sha256 f15ef9033a1f0522dd02b64b22448734826a7ff5387b75ba00397242c18481ba

# after: only the first call of the handle pays the acquisition; every later call is 1 allocation
width 4: per call on one handle [14019, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1] (tail 7), 8 handles of one call 158
test result: ok. 1 passed; 0 failed
sha256 05c97c7ee71da30a76ef1d9baf4061f797b9c7d31d1310ce9334d9c8c0902459

# 13 allocations per call -> 1. A member that parks between two calls makes the next reservation
# take threadteam's cold path (6 here), which the sum absorbs: 7 against 158, a margin over ten.

# the reentrancy guard's test, red: without the guard the nested call waits on a mutex the same
# thread holds, so the regression is a hang (the binary was cut off at 45 s)
$ timeout 45 ./target/debug/deps/faer_ffi-* a_nested_call --test-threads=1 ; echo $?
124
# and green with it: `a_nested_call_runs_sequentially ... ok`

# the repository gate for this crate, run three times on the head commit
$ cargo test -j4 -p faer-ffi
test tests::a_nested_call_runs_sequentially ... ok
test tests::a_reused_handle_builds_its_pool_once ... ok
test tests::scratch_sizes_follow_the_handle_without_entering_the_team ... ok
test tests::the_handle_is_shareable ... ok
test tests::the_team_handle_is_entered_per_call_and_left_again ... ok
test tests::the_token_carries_the_handle_width ... ok
test tests::two_threads_share_one_handle_and_take_turns ... ok
test result: ok. 7 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured; 0 filtered out
test result: ok. 0 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured; 0 filtered out   (doc-tests)
sha256 0903a1a4329859ab3bf8a61a426b4e6febfa911bb7d81e8e51ef19e9cb6f14ed (1/3)
sha256 9daa11a91be3598a6bb0237a159647402daf4af03357f68f5021eba59f9c9c0b (2/3)
sha256 e2d08be8d021aa8d4d26b92b4beadc30aa49ebf40ed15f10e684c45d9523f3e3 (3/3)

# the header is the committed one: CI asserts it (FAER_FFI=1, CI=1)
$ FAER_FFI=1 cargo +nightly build -j8 -p faer-ffi          # writes faer-ffi/faer.h
$ git status --short faer-ffi/faer.h                       # clean after the commit

# the documented C usage compiles and runs against the built cdylib: team, NULL, set_threads(1),
# widening to 3, destroy, destroy(NULL); c = a*a checked entry by entry
$ cc -std=c11 -Wall -Wextra -Werror -Ifaer-ffi -c smoke.c -o smoke.o && cc smoke.o -Ltarget/debug -lfaer_ffi -Wl,-rpath,$PWD/target/debug && ./smoke
7 10 15 22
$ echo $?
0

# rustdoc: no warnings (the two links to the private Team::with_par are plain code spans)
$ cargo doc -j8 -p faer-ffi --no-deps
# rustfmt: the hunks rustfmt reports in faer-ffi/src/lib.rs are all pre-existing — origin/main fails
# the same check in the same 39 places, and the file is not clean under the pinned 1.96 rustfmt
# (the job is continue-on-error). None of them is in this diff's regions.
# clippy: only pre-existing lints; in faer-ffi the one left is `ok().expect()`, the same shape faer's
# own `team::with_team` uses.
$ cargo clippy -j8 -p faer-ffi --all-targets -- --cap-lints=warn

Hosted CI has not scheduled a single workflow run on this branch (actions/runs?head_sha=... is
empty for all three commits) while sibling PRs opened in the same minutes do have runs, so the
required checks are missing rather than failing. That is a repository/Actions condition, not something
this diff can fix; the crate's own gate above is what was run.

Not run: the t4a-faer lib suite (nothing in faer/ changed; hosted CI owns that matrix), any GPU
work (the CUDA jobs of this repository touch faer, not faer-ffi), Windows/macOS (threadteam does
not pin there, so the placement test degrades as it already did), and fork without exec
(documented, deliberately untested).

Review: review: gpt-6.1-sol changes-requested (r1) -> changes-requested (r2) -> fixed in 0b835728
Two independent rounds on openai/gpt-6.1-sol, read-only, over the diff against origin/main.

Round 1 (806e265e) — 2 IMPORTANT, 4 MINOR, all verified against the source and all fixed:
a C callback nesting a call on the same handle deadlocked on the non-reentrant mutex; the fork rule
named a remedy (a fresh handle) that does not work because threadteam's worker cache and its mutex are
inherited; and three places where docs or tests claimed more than they showed (a two-batch allocation
bound, a first > 0 assertion that measured nothing, a "serialisation is tested" claim the products
did not show).

Round 2 (0808c92d) — 1 IMPORTANT, 3 MINOR, all verified and all fixed:
the allocation gate could fail correct code (a cold reservation on every call) and could pass a shape
that rebuilt a pool every other call, so it became a paired same-run comparison of two shapes; a call
nested in a callback takes no lock and so is not ordered against another thread using the same handle,
which the two-thread rule now says; and two doc claims (the first call "costs the pool's
construction", a resize "takes the old workers") were wrong and are gone.

Nothing was dismissed. Both rounds' reading conclusions agree that the ownership is sound on the
normal, panic and unwind paths, that InCall does not destroy its guard eagerly, and that fork
needs exec rather than a pid check.

…333)

`libfaer_v0_23_team_create` now builds one `threadteam::Pool` and the
handle owns it. A call moves the pool into a team, runs inside it and
moves it back out (`Team::with_par`), so the calling thread is outside
the team between calls and a handle reused for N calls builds one pool
rather than N. `set_threads` resizes the owned pool (a width of one
releases it, widening rebuilds it) and `destroy` drops it.

Before: 5 calls on a live handle cost 65 allocations (13 per call).
After: 5, which is threadteam's own reservation.

Owning a `threadteam::Team` in the handle instead would cost nothing
per call, but threadteam 0.5 pins the thread that creates a team for
the team's lifetime, so a C caller's thread would sit pinned between
calls; the crate's affinity test observes that placement directly.

Behavioural change: two threads may still call operations on one
handle, but their calls take turns on the single pool instead of each
building one. The lifetime rules (two threads, exclusive
set_threads/destroy, use after destroy, fork) are written on
`libfaer_v0_23_team_create` and in the regenerated `faer.h`; whether a
handle inherited across `fork` should be detected is left undecided.

The C API surface is unchanged, `NULL` is still serial, and a caller
that never calls `create` still gets correct results.
…'s rules (#333)

An operation called from inside another operation on the same thread — a C
callback calling back into this API, which `SchurParams::recommended_shift_count`
and its siblings do — would wait for the pool its own caller holds, and the
mutex is not reentrant, so it never returned. A thread-local guard now gives that
call `Par::Seq`: nesting is not parallel, it is correct. `then_some` cannot
express the guard (it builds its value eagerly, so the untaken branch drops one
and clears the flag its caller set), which the new test pins.

The rest is what review of the diff found, checked against threadteam 0.5.1 and
faer's own call sites:

- the fork rule named a remedy that does not work: a forked child inherits
  threadteam's worker cache and its mutex, so a *fresh* handle can block too.
  `exec` before using a team in a child whose parent already ran one.
- `destroy` returns the pool's workers to threadteam's process-wide cache rather
  than ending their threads, and resizing builds the new pool before the old one
  is dropped, so it cannot take the old one's workers back.
- the allocation test asserted on the cheapest of eight calls instead of a mean
  of two batches: a member that parks makes the next reservation cost six
  allocations (the cold path), which is still not a pool. Measured per call on
  one handle after the first: [14019, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1], and 13 on every call
  before this change.
- the shared-handle test now counts the calls inside the team and requires the
  maximum to be one, which is the serialisation the docs promise; the products
  alone would not show it.
@shinaoka

shinaoka commented Nov 9, 2026

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GPT-6.1-sol adversarial review

CRITICAL: none
NEEDS_CHANGES: 4
UNVERIFIED: 2

Critical (must not merge)

none

Needs changes

  • Same-handle callback reentry deadlocks, even with a sequential handle — faer-ffi/src/lib.rs:308–310,324. Reproduce with team_create(1), then call libfaer_v0_23_evd_f64 with a recommended_shift_count callback that performs a small matrix multiplication on separate buffers using that same handle. EVD holds the mutex while invoking the callback (lib.rs:2602; faer/src/linalg/evd/schur/real_schur.rs:2460), and the nested multiplication waits for that mutex; the outer operation cannot return to release it. The sequential branch also retains the lock throughout f, so narrowing to one does not avoid this regression.

  • The allocation gate confuses cold reservation costs with rebuilding a pool — faer-ffi/src/lib.rs:312,328,3199–3201; docs/worklogs/2026-11-09-ffi-team-pool.md:23–25,46–47. Reproduce by inserting a 20 ms sleep before each multiplication in the measured second batch: threadteam 0.5.1 releases the reservation with a zero idle duration, allowing members to leave their loops, and reacquisition then allocates the reservation vector, acquisition object, acquisition ID vector and claim jobs—not just one vector. Consequently, reused <= 2 * calls depends on scheduling and can reject an unchanged, correctly reused pool. Separately, team_create precedes alloc_probe::reset at lines 3182–3183, so the first-batch count does not measure pool construction and cannot substantiate the explanation that approximately 14,000 allocations start the pool’s threads. These paths were source-traced; the runtime allocation probe did not complete.

  • The fork workaround and worker-termination promise ignore the process-wide cache — faer-ffi/src/lib.rs:2738–2742,2773–2775; faer-ffi/faer.h:6376–6378. On Linux, reproduce in a fresh process with create(4); destroy(handle); fork();, then call create(4) in the child: destruction caches the default pool’s workers rather than terminating them, and the child’s new pool retrieves their inherited Rayon state and waits in the affinity-reset broadcast for workers that no longer exist. This follows threadteam 0.5.1’s src/pool.rs:294–313,831–846; creating a new handle after fork is therefore insufficient once the parent has populated the cache, and “the pool’s threads stop with it” is also false.

  • The formatting verification incorrectly attributes newly introduced failures to the base — faer-ffi/src/lib.rs:2847,3147–3148,3179–3180,3194. Running Rustfmt 1.96.0 with the committed rustfmt.toml against the requested head produces formatting changes in the newly added allocator method and tests, including splitting Counting::realloc and the new matrix initializers; these lines do not exist in the supplied base. Reproduce with rustfmt +1.96.0 --edition 2024 --config-path rustfmt.toml --check faer-ffi/src/lib.rs and compare the corresponding base output: the PR body’s claim that the reported hunks are “all pre-existing” is incorrect.

Unverified claims

  • “The serialisation … is tested” is not established by the assertions — docs/worklogs/2026-11-09-ffi-team-pool.md:54–56; faer-ffi/src/lib.rs:3143–3164. The test checks products, not whether operations overlap, and has no simultaneous-start barrier or overlap assertion. The concrete mutation to test is replacing Team::with_par with the previous per-call faer::team::with_team(self.threads, f) implementation: both independent products still satisfy every assertion, despite losing serialization. That mutation was not executed here.

  • The supplied local verification transcripts are not independently established for the requested SHA — .github/workflows/ci.yml:29,43–54. The underlying logs and smoke.c used for the quoted numerical smoke test cannot read from the supplied artifacts; their hashes alone do not establish the results. Queries for 806e265e7848f4d0bf6b4301d0ec05cb0e5c0249 returned zero check runs, zero Actions runs and a pending combined status with no status entries. The committed CI smoke step compiles an object only; it neither links nor executes the numerical smoke test quoted in the PR.

Checked and fine

none

Not checked: the full FFI suite and runtime EVD/fork reproducers; the allocation-probe worker timed out without a completed result. Findings target the supplied 806e265e revision, not subsequent revisions.


Reviewed head: 806e265e7848f4d0bf6b4301d0ec05cb0e5c0249 at 2026-11-09T10:17:48Z. This review is valid only for that commit: if the head has moved, it is a review of a tree that is not being merged.
Automated (gpt_review.sh). This is an enumeration of counterexamples, not a verdict; the merge decision stays with a human.

shinaoka and others added 2 commits November 9, 2026 19:36
…ed-call exception (#333)

Review of the previous commit found the gate itself unsound: asserting on the
cheapest of eight calls can fail correct code (a cold reservation on every call)
and can pass a shape that rebuilds a pool on every other call. The test now
measures two shapes over the same number of calls in one run — one handle for
eight calls, eight handles of one call each — and compares their sums, so no
single call's warm/cold state decides it. Tail 7 vs 158 here; with the
implementation reverted to origin/main the same test reads 91 vs 112 and fails.

The rest is doc accuracy the review also found:

- the first call of a pool pays threadteam's first *acquisition*, not the pool's
  construction: `create` builds the pool, outside the measured region.
- `set_threads` cannot hand the new pool the old pool's workers: the width
  changed, and threadteam's cache matches exact widths.
- a call nested in another call takes no lock, so it is not ordered against
  another thread using the same handle. The two-thread rule says so now, and the
  test's own limit (it forces no overlap) is recorded where the claim is.
…eproducers (#333)

Review r1 on 806e265, the three findings left open:

- fork / worker termination: the pool used threadteam's shared workers, so
  `destroy` parked them in the process-wide cache instead of ending them, and
  a child forked after a `destroy` took that cached Rayon pool (without its
  threads) in its own `create` and waited forever in the affinity broadcast.
  The pool is now built with a `thread_name`, which makes its workers
  dedicated: the drop joins them and neither side touches the cache.
  `faer-ffi/tests/fork.rs` measures it: thread count after `destroy` 6 vs 2
  and the destroy-fork-create child killed by SIGALRM before, all passing
  after. The `fork` rule in the docs now says what is measured: a child uses
  only handles it creates itself.
- callback reentry: `an_evd_callback_may_call_back_on_the_same_handle` runs
  the review's case through `libfaer_v0_23_evd_f64` with a
  `recommended_shift_count` callback that multiplies on the same handle, at
  width 1 and in parallel, under a deadline. It fails (width 1, deadlock) with
  the `InCall` guard disabled and passes with it.
- the allocation gate compared against eight handles of one call, which stopped
  discriminating once a `create` starts threads (the reverted implementation
  passed). The reference is now `faer::team::with_team` per call, what
  `origin/main` ran: tail 10 (42 with members parked) vs 91, reverted 98 vs 91.
- rustfmt (1.96.0, committed rustfmt.toml): the lines this branch adds are
  formatted; no hunk of `--check` changes an added line (5 did on 0b83572).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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faer-ffi: let the team handle own the pool instead of rebuilding it per call

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