Manual Pages  — SLEEP

The parameter chan is an arbitrary address that uniquely identifies the event on which the thread is being put to sleep. All threads sleeping on a single chan are woken up later by wakeup(), often called from inside an interrupt routine, to indicate that the resource the thread was blocking on is available now.

The parameter priority specifies a new priority for the thread as well as some optional flags. If the new priority is not 0, then the thread will be made runnable with the specified priority when it resumes. PZERO should never be used, as it is for compatibility only. A new priority of 0 means to use the thread's current priority when it is made runnable again.

If priority includes the PCATCH flag, pending signals are allowed to interrupt the sleep, otherwise pending signals are ignored during the sleep. If PCATCH is set and a signal becomes pending, ERESTART is returned if the current system call should be restarted if possible, and EINTR is returned if the system call should be interrupted by the signal (return EINTR).

The parameter wmesg is a string describing the sleep condition for tools like ps(1). Due to the limited space of those programs to display arbitrary strings, this message should not be longer than 6 characters.

The parameter timo specifies a timeout for the sleep. If timo is not 0, then the thread will sleep for at most timo, No, /, Va, hz seconds. If the timeout expires, then the sleep function will return EWOULDBLOCK.

msleep_sbt(), msleep_spin_sbt(), pause_sbt() and tsleep_sbt() functions take sbt parameter instead of timo. It allows the caller to specify relative or absolute wakeup time with higher resolution in form of sbintime_t. The parameter pr allows the caller to specify wanted absolute event precision. The parameter flags allows the caller to pass additional callout_reset_sbt() flags.

Several of the sleep functions including msleep(), msleep_spin(), and the locking primitive sleep routines specify an additional lock parameter. The lock will be released before sleeping and reacquired before the sleep routine returns. If priority includes the PDROP flag, then the lock will not be reacquired before returning. The lock is used to ensure that a condition can be checked atomically, and that the current thread can be suspended without missing a change to the condition, or an associated wakeup. In addition, all of the sleep routines will fully drop the Giant mutex (even if recursed) while the thread is suspended and will reacquire the Giant mutex before the function returns. Note that the Giant mutex may be specified as the lock to drop. In that case, however, the PDROP flag is not allowed.

To avoid lost wakeups, either a lock should be used to protect against races, or a timeout should be specified to place an upper bound on the delay due to a lost wakeup. As a result, the tsleep() function should only be invoked with a timeout of 0 when the Giant mutex is held.

The msleep() function requires that mtx reference a default, i.e. non-spin, mutex. Its use is deprecated in favor of mtx_sleep(9) which provides identical behavior.

The msleep_spin() function requires that mtx reference a spin mutex. The msleep_spin() function does not accept a priority parameter and thus does not support changing the current thread's priority, the PDROP flag, or catching signals via the PCATCH flag.

The pause() function is a wrapper around tsleep() that suspends execution of the current thread for the indicated timeout. The thread can not be awakened early by signals or calls to wakeup(), wakeup_one() or wakeup_any(). The pause_sig() function is a variant of pause() which can be awakened early by signals.

The wakeup_one() function makes the first highest priority thread in the queue that is sleeping on the parameter chan runnable. This reduces the load when a large number of threads are sleeping on the same address, but only one of them can actually do any useful work when made runnable.

Due to the way it works, the wakeup_one() function requires that only related threads sleep on a specific chan address. It is the programmer's responsibility to choose a unique chan value. The older wakeup() function did not require this, though it was never good practice for threads to share a chan value. When converting from wakeup() to wakeup_one(), pay particular attention to ensure that no other threads wait on the same chan.

The wakeup_any() function is similar to wakeup_one(), except that it makes runnable last thread on the queue (sleeping less), ignoring fairness. It can be used when threads sleeping on the chan are known to be identical and there is no reason to be fair.

If the timeout given by timo or sbt is based on an absolute real-time clock value, then the thread should copy the global rtc_generation into its td_rtcgen member before reading the RTC. If the real-time clock is adjusted, these functions will set td_rtcgen to zero and return zero. The caller should reconsider its orientation with the new RTC value.