Gecko recently had a bug reported [1] with a deadlock in the Rust TLS
implementation for Windows. TLS destructors are implemented in a sort of ad-hoc
fashion on Windows as it doesn't natively support destructors for TLS keys. To
work around this the runtime manages a list of TLS destructors and registers a
hook to get run whenever a thread exits. When a thread exits it takes a look at
the list and runs all destructors.
Unfortunately it turns out that there's a lock which is held when our "at thread
exit" callback is run. The callback then attempts to acquire a lock protecting
the list of TLS destructors. Elsewhere in the codebase while we hold a lock over
the TLS destructors we try to acquire the same lock held first before our
special callback is run. And as a result, deadlock!
This commit sidesteps the issue with a few small refactorings:
* Removed support for destroying a TLS key on Windows. We don't actually ever
exercise this as a public-facing API, and it's only used during `lazy_init`
during racy situations. To handle that we just synchronize `lazy_init`
globally on Windows so we never have to call `destroy`.
* With no need to support removal the global synchronized `Vec` was tranformed
to a lock-free linked list. With the removal of locks this means that
iteration no long requires a lock and as such we won't run into the deadlock
problem mentioned above.
Note that it's still a general problem that you have to be extra super careful
in TLS destructors. For example no code which runs a TLS destructor on Windows
can call back into the Windows API to do a dynamic library lookup. Unfortunately
I don't know of a great way around that, but this at least fixes the immediate
problem that Gecko was seeing which is that with "well behaved" destructors the
system would still deadlock!
[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1358151