the function itself was static, but the weak alias provided an
externally visible reference and thus prevented the dead code from
being omitted from the output. so this change actually reduces bloat
in mandatory static-linked code.
this is the first step in an overhaul aimed at greatly simplifying and
optimizing everything dealing with thread-local state.
previously, the thread pointer was initialized lazily on first access,
or at program startup if stack protector was in use, or at certain
random places where inconsistent state could be reached if it were not
initialized early. while believed to be fully correct, the logic was
fragile and non-obvious.
in the first phase of the thread pointer overhaul, support is retained
(and in some cases improved) for systems/situation where loading the
thread pointer fails, e.g. old kernels.
some notes on specific changes:
- the confusing use of libc.main_thread as an indicator that the
thread pointer is initialized is eliminated in favor of an explicit
has_thread_pointer predicate.
- sigaction no longer needs to ensure that the thread pointer is
initialized before installing a signal handler (this was needed to
prevent a situation where the signal handler caused the thread
pointer to be initialized and the subsequent sigreturn cleared it
again) but it still needs to ensure that implementation-internal
thread-related signals are not blocked.
- pthread tsd initialization for the main thread is deferred in a new
manner to minimize bloat in the static-linked __init_tp code.
- pthread_setcancelstate no longer needs special handling for the
situation before the thread pointer is initialized. it simply fails
on systems that cannot support a thread pointer, which are
non-conforming anyway.
- pthread_cleanup_push/pop now check for missing thread pointer and
nop themselves out in this case, so stdio no longer needs to avoid
the cancellable path when the thread pointer is not available.
a number of cases remain where certain interfaces may crash if the
system does not support a thread pointer. at this point, these should
be limited to pthread interfaces, and the number of such cases should
be fewer than before.
the external mmap function is heavy because it has to handle error
reporting that the kernel cannot do, and has to do some locking for
arcane race-condition-avoidance purposes. for allocating initial TLS,
we do not need any of that; the raw syscall suffices.
on i386, this change shaves off 13% of the size of .text for the empty
program.
this is needed for reused threads in the SIGEV_THREAD timer
notification system, and could be reused elsewhere in the future if
needed, though it should be refactored for such use.
for static linking, __init_tls.c is simply modified to export the TLS
info in a structure with external linkage, rather than using statics.
this perhaps makes the code more clear, since the statics were poorly
named for statics. the new __reset_tls.c is only linked if it is used.
for dynamic linking, the code is in dynlink.c. sharing code with
__copy_tls is not practical since __reset_tls must also re-zero
thread-local bss.
apparently this was never noticed before because the linker normally
optimizes dynamic TLS models to non-dynamic ones when static linking,
thus eliminating the calls to __tls_get_addr which crash when the dtv
is missing. however, some libsupc++ code on ARM was calling
__tls_get_addr when static linked and crashing. the reason is unclear
to me, but with this issue fixed it should work now anyway.
libc is the macro, __libc is the internal symbol, but under some
configurations on old/broken compilers, the symbol might not actually
exist and the libc macro might instead use __libc_loc() to obtain
access to the object.
this mirrors the stdio_impl.h cleanup. one header which is not
strictly needed, errno.h, is left in pthread_impl.h, because since
pthread functions return their error codes rather than using errno,
nearly every single pthread function needs the errno constants.
in a few places, rather than bringing in string.h to use memset, the
memset was replaced by direct assignment. this seems to generate much
better code anyway, and makes many functions which were previously
non-leaf functions into leaf functions (possibly eliminating a great
deal of bloat on some platforms where non-leaf functions require ugly
prologue and/or epilogue).
despite documentation that makes it sound a lot different, the only
ABI-constraint difference between TLS variants II and I seems to be
that variant II stores the initial TLS segment immediately below the
thread pointer (i.e. the thread pointer points to the end of it) and
variant I stores the initial TLS segment above the thread pointer,
requiring the thread descriptor to be stored below. the actual value
stored in the thread pointer register also tends to have per-arch
random offsets applied to it for silly micro-optimization purposes.
with these changes applied, TLS should be basically working on all
supported archs except microblaze. I'm still working on getting the
necessary information and a working toolchain that can build TLS
binaries for microblaze, but in theory, static-linked programs with
TLS and dynamic-linked programs where only the main executable uses
TLS should already work on microblaze.
alignment constraints have not yet been heavily tested, so it's
possible that this code does not always align TLS segments correctly
on archs that need TLS variant I.
the code in __libc_start_main is now responsible for parsing auxv,
rather than duplicating the parsing all over the place. this should
shave off a few cycles and some code size. __init_libc is left as an
external-linkage function despite the fact that it could be static, to
prevent it from being inlined and permanently wasting stack space when
main is called.
a few other minor changes are included, like eliminating per-thread
ssp canaries (they were likely broken when combined with certain
dlopen usages, and completely unnecessary) and some other unnecessary
checks. since this code gets linked into every program, it should be
as small and simple as possible.
unlike other implementations, this one reserves memory for new TLS in
all pre-existing threads at dlopen-time, and dlopen will fail with no
resources consumed and no new libraries loaded if memory is not
available. memory is not immediately distributed to running threads;
that would be too complex and too costly. instead, assurances are made
that threads needing the new TLS can obtain it in an async-signal-safe
way from a buffer belonging to the dynamic linker/new module (via
atomic fetch-and-add based allocator).
I've re-appropriated the lock that was previously used for __synccall
(synchronizing set*id() syscalls between threads) as a general
pthread_create lock. it's a "backwards" rwlock where the "read"
operation is safe atomic modification of the live thread count, which
multiple threads can perform at the same time, and the "write"
operation is making sure the count does not increase during an
operation that depends on it remaining bounded (__synccall or dlopen).
in static-linked programs that don't use __synccall, this lock is a
no-op and has no cost.
the design for TLS in dynamic-linked programs is mostly complete too,
but I have not yet implemented it. cost is nonzero but still low for
programs which do not use TLS and/or do not use threads (a few hundred
bytes of new code, plus dependency on memcpy). i believe it can be
made smaller at some point by merging __init_tls and __init_security
into __libc_start_main and avoiding duplicate auxv-parsing code.
at the same time, I've also slightly changed the logic pthread_create
uses to allocate guard pages to ensure that guard pages are not
counted towards commit charge.
Rich Felker