this patch improves the correctness, simplicity, and size of
cancellation-related code. modulo any small errors, it should now be
completely conformant, safe, and resource-leak free.
the notion of entering and exiting cancellation-point context has been
completely eliminated and replaced with alternative syscall assembly
code for cancellable syscalls. the assembly is responsible for setting
up execution context information (stack pointer and address of the
syscall instruction) which the cancellation signal handler can use to
determine whether the interrupted code was in a cancellable state.
these changes eliminate race conditions in the previous generation of
cancellation handling code (whereby a cancellation request received
just prior to the syscall would not be processed, leaving the syscall
to block, potentially indefinitely), and remedy an issue where
non-cancellable syscalls made from signal handlers became cancellable
if the signal handler interrupted a cancellation point.
x86_64 asm is untested and may need a second try to get it right.
with this patch, the syscallN() functions are no longer needed; a
variadic syscall() macro allows syscalls with anywhere from 0 to 6
arguments to be made with a single macro name. also, manually casting
each non-integer argument with (long) is no longer necessary; the
casts are hidden in the macros.
some source files which depended on being able to define the old macro
SYSCALL_RETURNS_ERRNO have been modified to directly use __syscall()
instead of syscall(). references to SYSCALL_SIGSET_SIZE and SYSCALL_LL
have also been changed.
x86_64 has not been tested, and may need a follow-up commit to fix any
minor bugs/oversights.
this commit shuffles around the location of syscall definitions so
that we can make a syscall() library function with both SYS_* and
__NR_* style syscall names available to user applications, provides
the syscall() library function, and optimizes the code that performs
the actual inline syscalls in the library itself.
previously on i386 when built as PIC (shared library), syscalls were
incurring bus lock (lock prefix) overhead at entry and exit, due to
the way the ebx register was being loaded (xchg instruction with a
memory operand). now the xchg takes place between two registers.
further cleanup to arch/$(ARCH)/syscall.h is planned.
this was originally written for an early draft of the library where
non-standard functions would reside in a static library separate from
the shared libc.so, which would implement a pure standard. the idea
was not to depend on an implementation-dependent __syscall_ret
function in the main libc. but it turned out to be better to put
everything in a single library for both static and dynamic linking
uses, and thus the (incomplete) remnants of this feature were just
enlarging the source and binary.
Rich Felker
Nicholas J. Kain