the new approach relies on the fact that the only ways to create
sigset_t objects without invoking UB are to use the sig*set()
functions, or from the masks returned by sigprocmask, sigaction, etc.
or in the ucontext_t argument to a signal handler. thus, as long as
sigfillset and sigaddset avoid adding the "protected" signals, there
is no way the application will ever obtain a sigset_t including these
bits, and thus no need to add the overhead of checking/clearing them
when sigprocmask or sigaction is called.
note that the old code actually *failed* to remove the bits from
sa_mask when sigaction was called.
the new implementations are also significantly smaller, simpler, and
faster due to ignoring the useless "GNU HURD signals" 65-1024, which
are not used and, if there's any sanity in the world, never will be
used.
the previous implementation had at least 2 problems:
1. the case where additional threads reached the barrier before the
first wave was finished leaving the barrier was untested and seemed
not to be working.
2. threads leaving the barrier continued to access memory within the
barrier object after other threads had successfully returned from
pthread_barrier_wait. this could lead to memory corruption or crashes
if the barrier object had automatic storage in one of the waiting
threads and went out of scope before all threads finished returning,
or if one thread unmapped the memory in which the barrier object
lived.
the new implementation avoids both problems by making the barrier
state essentially local to the first thread which enters the barrier
wait, and forces that thread to be the last to return.
with this patch, musl compiles and mostly works with pcc 1.0.0. a few
tests are still failing and i'm uncertain whether they are due to
portability problems in musl, or bugs in pcc, but i suspect the
latter.
some functions that should have been testing whether pthread_self()
had been called and initialized the thread pointer were instead
testing whether pthread_create() had been called and actually made the
program "threaded". while it's unlikely any mismatch would occur in
real-world problems, this could have introduced subtle bugs. now, we
store the address of the main thread's thread descriptor in the libc
structure and use its presence as a flag that the thread register is
initialized. note that after fork, the calling thread (not necessarily
the original main thread) is the new main thread.
the goal is to be able to use pthread_setcancelstate internally in
the implementation, whenever a function might want to use functions
which are cancellation points but avoid becoming a cancellation point
itself. i could have just used a separate internal function for
temporarily inhibiting cancellation, but the solution in this commit
is better because (1) it's one less implementation-specific detail in
functions that need to use it, and (2) application code can also get
the same benefit.
previously, pthread_setcancelstate dependend on pthread_self, which
would pull in unwanted thread setup overhead for non-threaded
programs. now, it temporarily stores the state in the global libc
struct if threads have not been initialized, and later moves it if
needed. this way we can instead use __pthread_self, which has no
dependencies and assumes that the thread register is already valid.
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.
otherwise we cannot support an application's desire to use
asynchronous cancellation within the callback function. this change
also slightly debloats pthread_create.c.
this is something of a tradeoff, as now set*id() functions, rather
than pthread_create, are what pull in the code overhead for dealing
with linux's refusal to implement proper POSIX thread-vs-process
semantics. my motivations are:
1. it's cleaner this way, especially cleaner to optimize out the
rsyscall locking overhead from pthread_create when it's not needed.
2. it's expected that only a tiny number of core system programs will
ever use set*id() functions, whereas many programs may want to use
threads, and making thread overhead tiny is an incentive for "light"
programs to try threads.
with these small changes, libc functions which need to call functions
which are cancellation points, but which themselves must not be
cancellation points, can use the CANCELPT_INHIBIT and CANCELPT_RESUME
macros to temporarily inhibit all cancellation.
we want to keep atomically updated fields (locks and thread count) and
really anything writable far away from frequently-needed function
pointers. stuff some rarely-needed function pointers in between to
pad, hopefully up to a cache line boundary.
the major idea of this patch is not to depend on having the timer
pointer delivered to the signal handler, and instead use the thread
pointer to get the callback function address and argument. this way,
the parent thread can make the timer_create syscall while the child
thread is starting, and it should never have to block waiting for the
barrier.
- there is no longer any risk of spoofing cancellation requests, since
the cancel flag is set in pthread_cancel rather than in the signal
handler.
- cancellation signal is no longer unblocked when running the
cancellation handlers. instead, pthread_create will cause any new
threads created from a cancellation handler to unblock their own
cancellation signal.
- various tweaks in preparation for POSIX timer support.
the biggest change in this commit is that stdio now uses readv to fill
the caller's buffer and the FILE buffer with a single syscall, and
likewise writev to flush the FILE buffer and write out the caller's
buffer in a single syscall.
making this change required fundamental architectural changes to
stdio, so i also made a number of other improvements in the process:
- the implementation no longer assumes that further io will fail
following errors, and no longer blocks io when the error flag is set
(though the latter could easily be changed back if desired)
- unbuffered mode is no longer implemented as a one-byte buffer. as a
consequence, scanf unreading has to use ungetc, to the unget buffer
has been enlarged to hold at least 2 wide characters.
- the FILE structure has been rearranged to maintain the locations of
the fields that might be used in glibc getc/putc type macros, while
shrinking the structure to save some space.
- error cases for fflush, fseek, etc. should be more correct.
- library-internal macros are used for getc_unlocked and putc_unlocked
now, eliminating some ugly code duplication. __uflow and __overflow
are no longer used anywhere but these macros. switch to read or
write mode is also separated so the code can be better shared, e.g.
with ungetc.
- lots of other small things.
this commit addresses two issues:
1. a race condition, whereby a cancellation request occurring after a
syscall returned from kernelspace but before the subsequent
CANCELPT_END would cause cancellable resource-allocating syscalls
(like open) to leak resources.
2. signal handlers invoked while the thread was blocked at a
cancellation point behaved as if asynchronous cancellation mode wer in
effect, resulting in potentially dangerous state corruption if a
cancellation request occurs.
the glibc/nptl implementation of threads shares both of these issues.
with this commit, both are fixed. however, cancellation points
encountered in a signal handler will not be acted upon if the signal
was received while the thread was already at a cancellation point.
they will of course be acted upon after the signal handler returns, so
in real-world usage where signal handlers quickly return, it should
not be a problem. it's possible to solve this problem too by having
sigaction() wrap all signal handlers with a function that uses a
pthread_cleanup handler to catch cancellation, patch up the saved
context, and return into the cancellable function that will catch and
act upon the cancellation. however that would be a lot of complexity
for minimal if any benefit...
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.
some of this code should be cleaned up, e.g. using macros for some of
the bit flags, masks, etc. nonetheless, the code is believed to be
working and correct at this point.
the layout has been chosen so that pointer slots 3 and 4 fit between
the integer slots on 32-bit archs, and come after the integer slots on
64-bit archs.
we can avoid blocking signals by simply using a flag to mark that the
thread has exited and prevent it from getting counted in the rsyscall
signal-pingpong. this restores the original pthread create/join
throughput from before the sigprocmask call was added.
problem 1: mutex type from the attribute was being ignored by
pthread_mutex_init, so recursive/errorchecking mutexes were never
being used at all.
problem 2: ownership of recursive mutexes was not being enforced at
unlock time.
prefer using visibility=hidden for __libc internal data, rather than
an accessor function, if the compiler has visibility.
optimize with -O3 for PIC targets (shared library). without heavy
inlining, reloading the GOT register in small functions kills
performance. 20-30% size increase for a single libc.so is not a big
deal, compared to comparaible size increase in every static binaries.
use -Bsymbolic-functions, not -Bsymbolic. global variables are subject
to COPY relocations, and thus binding their addresses in the library
at link time will cause library functions to read the wrong (original)
copies instead of the copies made in the main program's bss section.
add entry point, _start, for dynamic linker.
prior to this change, a large portion of libc was unusable prior to
relocation by the dynamic linker, due to dependence on the global data
in the __libc structure and the need to obtain its address through the
GOT. with this patch, the accessor function __libc_loc is now able to
obtain the address of __libc via PC-relative addressing without using
the GOT. this means the majority of libc functionality is now
accessible right away.
naturally, the above statements all depend on having an architecture
where PC-relative addressing and jumps/calls are feasible, and a
compiler that generates the appropriate code.
note that this presently does not handle consistency of the libc's own
global state during forking. as per POSIX 2008, if the parent process
was threaded, the child process may only call async-signal-safe
functions until one of the exec-family functions is called, so the
current behavior is believed to be conformant even if non-ideal. it
may be improved at some later time.
this allows sys/types.h to provide the pthread types, as required by
POSIX. this design also facilitates forcing ABI-compatible sizes in
the arch-specific alltypes.h, while eliminating the need for
developers changing the internals of the pthread types to poke around
with arch-specific headers they may not be able to test.
- hide all the legacy xxxxxx32 name cruft in syscall.h so the actual
source files can be clean and uniform across all archs.
- cleanup llseek/lseek and mmap2/mmap handling for 32/64 bit systems
- alternate implementation for nice if the target lacks nice syscall
Rich Felker