This is a breaking change. It defines the new environment variable named
_COSMO_FDS_V2 which is used for inheriting non-stdio file descriptors on
execve() or posix_spawn(). No effort has been spent thus far integrating
with the older variable. If a new binary launches the older ones or vice
versa they'll only be able to pass stdin / stdout / stderr to each other
therefore it's important that you upgrade all your cosmo binaries if you
depend on this functionality. You'll be glad you did because inheritance
of file descriptors is more aligned with the POSIX standard than before.
Cosmopolitan now supports mremap(), which is only supported on Linux and
NetBSD. First, it allows memory mappings to be relocated without copying
them; this can dramatically speed up data structures like std::vector if
the array size grows larger than 256kb. The mremap() system call is also
10x faster than munmap() when shrinking large memory mappings.
There's now two functions, getpagesize() and getgransize() which help to
write portable code that uses mmap(MAP_FIXED). Alternative sysconf() may
be called with our new _SC_GRANSIZE. The madvise() system call now has a
better wrapper with improved documentation.
It's now possible to create thousands of thousands of sparse independent
memory mappings, without any slowdown. The memory manager is better with
tracking memory protection now, particularly on Windows in a precise way
that can be restored during fork(). You now have the highest quality mem
manager possible. It's even better than some OSes like XNU, where mmap()
is implemented as an O(n) operation which means sadly things aren't much
improved over there. With this change the llamafile HTTP server endpoint
at /tokenize with a prompt of 50 tokens is now able to handle 2.6m r/sec
It hasn't been helpful enough to be justify the maintenance burden. What
actually does help is mprotect(), kprintf(), --ftrace and --strace which
can always be counted upon to work correctly. We aren't losing much with
this change. Support for ASAN on AARCH64 was never implemented. Applying
ASAN to the core libc runtimes was disabled many months ago. If there is
some way to have an ASAN runtime for user programs that is less invasive
we can potentially consider reintroducing support. But now is premature.
Actually Portable Executable now supports Android. Cosmo's old mmap code
required a 47 bit address space. The new implementation is very agnostic
and supports both smaller address spaces (e.g. embedded) and even modern
56-bit PML5T paging for x86 which finally came true on Zen4 Threadripper
Cosmopolitan no longer requires UNIX systems to observe the Windows 64kb
granularity; i.e. sysconf(_SC_PAGE_SIZE) will now report the host native
page size. This fixes a longstanding POSIX conformance issue, concerning
file mappings that overlap the end of file. Other aspects of conformance
have been improved too, such as the subtleties of address assignment and
and the various subtleties surrounding MAP_FIXED and MAP_FIXED_NOREPLACE
On Windows, mappings larger than 100 megabytes won't be broken down into
thousands of independent 64kb mappings. Support for MAP_STACK is removed
by this change; please use NewCosmoStack() instead.
Stack overflow avoidance is now being implemented using the POSIX thread
APIs. Please use GetStackBottom() and GetStackAddr(), instead of the old
error-prone GetStackAddr() and HaveStackMemory() APIs which are removed.
If pthread_create() is linked into the binary, then the cosmo runtime
will create an independent dlmalloc arena for each core. Whenever the
malloc() function is used it will index `g_heaps[sched_getcpu() / 2]`
to find the arena with the greatest hyperthread / numa locality. This
may be configured via an environment variable. For example if you say
`export COSMOPOLITAN_HEAP_COUNT=1` then you can restore the old ways.
Your process may be configured to have anywhere between 1 - 128 heaps
We need this revision because it makes multithreaded C++ applications
faster. For example, an HTTP server I'm working on that makes extreme
use of the STL went from 16k to 2000k requests per second, after this
change was made. To understand why, try out the malloc_test benchmark
which calls malloc() + realloc() in a loop across many threads, which
sees a a 250x improvement in process clock time and 200x on wall time
The tradeoff is this adds ~25ns of latency to individual malloc calls
compared to MODE=tiny, once the cosmo runtime has transitioned into a
fully multi-threaded state. If you don't need malloc() to be scalable
then cosmo provides many options for you. For starters the heap count
variable above can be set to put the process back in single heap mode
plus you can go even faster still, if you include tinymalloc.inc like
many of the programs in tool/build/.. are already doing since that'll
shave tens of kb off your binary footprint too. Theres also MODE=tiny
which is configured to use just 1 plain old dlmalloc arena by default
Another tradeoff is we need more memory now (except in MODE=tiny), to
track the provenance of memory allocation. This is so allocations can
be freely shared across threads, and because OSes can reschedule code
to different CPUs at any time.
Cosmopolitan now supports 104 time zones. They're embedded inside any
binary that links the localtime() function. Doing so adds about 100kb
to the binary size. This change also gets time zones working properly
on Windows for the first time. It's not needed to have /etc/localtime
exist on Windows, since we can get this information from WIN32. We're
also now updated to the latest version of Paul Eggert's TZ library.
This change upgrades to GCC 12.3 and GNU binutils 2.42. The GNU linker
appears to have changed things so that only a single de-duplicated str
table is present in the binary, and it gets placed wherever the linker
wants, regardless of what the linker script says. To cope with that we
need to stop using .ident to embed licenses. As such, this change does
significant work to revamp how third party licenses are defined in the
codebase, using `.section .notice,"aR",@progbits`.
This new GCC 12.3 toolchain has support for GNU indirect functions. It
lets us support __target_clones__ for the first time. This is used for
optimizing the performance of libc string functions such as strlen and
friends so far on x86, by ensuring AVX systems favor a second codepath
that uses VEX encoding. It shaves some latency off certain operations.
It's a useful feature to have for scientific computing for the reasons
explained by the test/libcxx/openmp_test.cc example which compiles for
fifteen different microarchitectures. Thanks to the upgrades, it's now
also possible to use newer instruction sets, such as AVX512FP16, VNNI.
Cosmo now uses the %gs register on x86 by default for TLS. Doing it is
helpful for any program that links `cosmo_dlopen()`. Such programs had
to recompile their binaries at startup to change the TLS instructions.
That's not great, since it means every page in the executable needs to
be faulted. The work of rewriting TLS-related x86 opcodes, is moved to
fixupobj.com instead. This is great news for MacOS x86 users, since we
previously needed to morph the binary every time for that platform but
now that's no longer necessary. The only platforms where we need fixup
of TLS x86 opcodes at runtime are now Windows, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. On
Windows we morph TLS to point deeper into the TIB, based on a TlsAlloc
assignment, and on OpenBSD/NetBSD we morph %gs back into %fs since the
kernels do not allow us to specify a value for the %gs register.
OpenBSD users are now required to use APE Loader to run Cosmo binaries
and assimilation is no longer possible. OpenBSD kernel needs to change
to allow programs to specify a value for the %gs register, or it needs
to stop marking executable pages loaded by the kernel as mimmutable().
This release fixes __constructor__, .ctor, .init_array, and lastly the
.preinit_array so they behave the exact same way as glibc.
We no longer use hex constants to define math.h symbols like M_PI.
- Introduce portable sched_getcpu() api
- Support GCC's __target_clones__ feature
- Make fma() go faster on x86 in default mode
- Remove some asan checks from core libraries
- WinMain() now ensures $HOME and $USER are defined
Somehow or another, I previously had missed `BUILD.mk` files.
In the process I found a few straggler cases where the modeline was
different from the file, including one very involved manual fix where a
file had been treated like it was ts=2 and ts=8 on separate occasions.
The commit history in the PR shows the gory details; the BUILD.mk was
automated, everything else was mostly manual.
