An OS thread M can run on any available P. While there are some caches associated with each P, Ps are fundamentally there to insure that only so many CPUs worth

An OS thread M can run on any available P. While there are some caches associated with each P, Ps are fundamentally there to insure that only so many CPUs worth of Go user code is ever running at once, so the important thing is that an M that wants to run user Go code has some P, not a particular P. Ms claim and release Ps as they go in and out of running Go user code, but I believe they don't release and then re-acquire a P as they switch between goroutines. (I believe the actual implementation treats Ms as a sort of secondary thing. For instance, I think that the local list of runnable goroutines is attached to the P, not to the M. At one level, the M is just a context for running things on Ps.) In the optimistic case when the system call blocks for too long, the M is unpinned from the P it was using and continues to sit in the system call (the Go runtime doesn't attempt to interrupt the system call itself). If there is another runnable goroutine and there are no free M's, the Go scheduler will create another M to run the goroutine on the now-free P. I think that the runtime directly allocates the free P to the newly created M rather than letting the new M try to contend with other things for the P, but I'm not sure. I don't think there's any limit on the number of Ms (OS threads) that the Go runtime will create, but I haven't checked the code carefully. Idle Ms are reclaimed under some circumstances. (I'm the author of the linked-to article.)