How does `spawn_link` work under the hood?

Questions / Help
1

Recently, I’ve been covering my bases by familiarizing myself with the Erlang ecosystem. While reading “Designing for Scalability”, I came across this line:

Calling spawn_link/3 has the same effect as calling spawn/3 followed by link/1, except that it is executed atomically, eliminating the race condition where a process terminates between the spawn and the link.

Cesarini, Francesco; Vinoski, Steve. Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP: Implement Robust, Fault-Tolerant Systems (Kindle Locations 956-958). O’Reilly Media. Kindle Edition.

Next, I looked through the source code:

I don’t see the “atomic execution”. Could someone explain how that is achieved?

1 Like
2

You’ve got the wrong spawn_link function. spawn_link/4 is for spawning a process on a remote node, so the code you’re seeing with net_kernel and call and so forth is about talking to the remote node to tell it to spawn something.

spawn_link/1 for doing spawn_link(fn -> do_something() end) is really just the same as spawn_link(:erlang, :apply, [fn -> do_something() end, []]) so what we want is spawn_link/3

The spawn_link/3 function for doing it mod/fun/args style is here: https://github.com/erlang/otp/blob/master/erts/preloaded/src/erlang.erl#L1749 however is a NIF, so you’ll need to dig into the C code if you want to go further.

4 Likes
3

The erlang:spawn_link/3 calls spawn_link_3 in erts/emulator/beam/bif.c which in turn calls erl_create_process in erts/emulator/beam/erl_process.c with the SPO_LINK option to tell it to setup bidirectional links between parent and child. This is the only difference between spawn and spawn_link

1 Like
4

There is a reason you actually NEED spawn_link: without it it is possible for one of the processes to die without the link being set up and the other process not finding out about it. For example with a spawn then link sequence we could get:

pid = spawn(...)
**<EXIT we crash>**
link(pid)

and the link is never setup. Unlikely yes, but it will happen.

We found out about this the hard way! :grinning:

10 Likes
5

Good point, this case is also mentioned in Programming Erlang (2nd edition)

2 Likes