This change makes fork() go nearly as fast as sys_fork() on UNIX. As for
Windows this change shaves about 4-5ms off fork() + wait() latency. This
is accomplished by using WriteProcessMemory() from the parent process to
setup the address space of a suspended process; it is better than a pipe
On Windows, mmap() now chooses addresses transactionally. It reduces the
risk of badness when interacting with the WIN32 memory manager. We don't
throw darts anymore. There is also no more retry limit, since we recover
from mystery maps more gracefully. The subroutine for combining adjacent
maps has been rewritten for clarity. The print maps subroutine is better
This change goes to great lengths to perfect the stack overflow code. On
Windows you can now longjmp() out of a crash signal handler. Guard pages
previously weren't being restored properly by the signal handler. That's
fixed, so on Windows you can now handle a stack overflow multiple times.
Great thought has been put into selecting the perfect SIGSTKSZ constants
so you can save sigaltstack() memory. You can now use kprintf() with 512
bytes of stack available. The guard pages beneath the main stack are now
recorded in the memory manager.
This change fixes getcontext() so it works right with the %rax register.
This change makes send() / sendto() always block on Windows. It's needed
because poll(POLLOUT) doesn't guarantee a socket is immediately writable
on Windows, and it caused rsync to fail because it made that assumption.
The only exception is when a SO_SNDTIMEO is specified which will EAGAIN.
Tests are added confirming MSG_WAITALL and MSG_NOSIGNAL work as expected
on all our supported OSes. Most of the platform-specific MSG_FOO magnums
have been deleted, with the exception of MSG_FASTOPEN. Your --strace log
will now show MSG_FOO flags as symbols rather than numbers.
I've also removed cv_wait_example_test because it's 0.3% flaky with Qemu
under system load since it depends on a process being readily scheduled.
You would think this is an important bug fix, but unfortunately all UNIX
implementations I've evaluated have a bug in read that causes signals to
not be handled atomically. The only exception is the latest iteration of
Cosmopolitan's read/write polyfill on Windows, which is somewhat ironic.
The worst issue I had with consts.sh for clock_gettime is how it defined
too many clocks. So I looked into these clocks all day to figure out how
how they overlap in functionality. I discovered counter-intuitive things
such as how CLOCK_MONOTONIC should be CLOCK_UPTIME on MacOS and BSD, and
that CLOCK_BOOTTIME should be CLOCK_MONOTONIC on MacOS / BSD. Windows 10
also has some incredible new APIs, that let us simplify clock_gettime().
- Linux CLOCK_REALTIME -> GetSystemTimePreciseAsFileTime()
- Linux CLOCK_MONOTONIC -> QueryUnbiasedInterruptTimePrecise()
- Linux CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW -> QueryUnbiasedInterruptTimePrecise()
- Linux CLOCK_REALTIME_COARSE -> GetSystemTimeAsFileTime()
- Linux CLOCK_MONOTONIC_COARSE -> QueryUnbiasedInterruptTime()
- Linux CLOCK_BOOTTIME -> QueryInterruptTimePrecise()
Documentation on the clock crew has been added to clock_gettime() in the
docstring and in redbean's documentation too. You can read that to learn
interesting facts about eight essential clocks that survived this purge.
This is original research you will not find on Google, OpenAI, or Claude
I've tested this change by porting *NSYNC to become fully clock agnostic
since it has extensive tests for spotting irregularities in time. I have
also included these tests in the default build so they no longer need to
be run manually. Both CLOCK_REALTIME and CLOCK_MONOTONIC are good across
the entire amd64 and arm64 test fleets.
This is one of the few POSIX APIs that was missing. It lets you choose a
monotonic clock for your condition variables. This might improve perf on
some platforms. It might also grant more flexibility with NTP configs. I
know Qt is one project that believes it needs this. To introduce this, I
needed to change some the *NSYNC APIs, to support passing a clock param.
There's also new benchmarks, demonstrating Cosmopolitan's supremacy over
many libc implementations when it comes to mutex performance. Cygwin has
an alarmingly bad pthread_mutex_t implementation. It is so bad that they
would have been significantly better off if they'd used naive spinlocks.
poll() and select() now delegate to ppoll() and pselect() for assurances
that both polyfill implementations are correct and well-tested. Poll now
polyfills XNU and BSD quirks re: the hanndling of POLLNVAL and the other
similar status flags. This change resolves a misunderstanding concerning
how select(exceptfds) is intended to map to POLPRI. We now use E2BIG for
bouncing requests that exceed the 64 handle limit on Windows. With pipes
and consoles on Windows our poll impl will now report POLLHUP correctly.
Issues with Windows path generation have been fixed. For example, it was
problematic on Windows to say: posix_spawn_file_actions_addchdir_np("/")
due to the need to un-UNC paths in some additional places. Calling fstat
on UNC style volume path handles will now work. posix_spawn now supports
simulating the opening of /dev/null and other special paths on Windows.
Cosmopolitan no longer defines epoll(). I think wepoll is a nice project
for using epoll() on Windows socket handles. However we need generalized
file descriptor support to make epoll() for Windows work well enough for
inclusion in a C library. It's also not worth having epoll() if we can't
get it to work on XNU and BSD OSes which provide different abstractions.
Even epoll() on Linux isn't that great of an abstraction since it's full
of footguns. Last time I tried to get it to be useful I had little luck.
Considering how long it took to get poll() and select() to be consistent
across platforms, we really have no business claiming to have epoll too.
While it'd be nice to have fully implemented, the only software that use
epoll() are event i/o libraries used by things like nodejs. Event i/o is
not the best paradigm for handling i/o; threads make so much more sense.
- CLOCK_THREAD_CPUTIME_ID
- CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID
Cosmo now supports the above constants universally across supported OSes
therefore it's now safe to let programs detect their presence w/ #ifdefs
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
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.
🚨 clang-format changes output per version!
This is with version 19.0.0. The modifications seem to be fixing the old
version’s errors - mainly involving omitted whitespace around binary ops
and inserted whitespace between goto labels and colons (if followed by a
curly brace.)
Also fixes a few mistakes made by e.g. someone (ahem) forgetting to pass
his ctl/string.h modifications through it.
We should add this to .git-blame-ignore-revs once we have its final hash
on master.
- 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
Now we do them for assimilated binaries (except on OpenBSD or XNU
non-Silicon), for XnuSilicon, and for binaries with the preserve-
argv[0] auxv flag set. We check whether to pass the argv[0] value
at the test site rather than the Child site. We move a lot of the
test initialization into Child in the non-child case, in order to
get at the pre-init value of `__program_executable_name`. Finally,
we print out info about what we are skipping.
Now that our socket system call polyfills are good enough to support
Musl's DNS library we should be using that rather than the barebones
domain name system implementation we rolled on our own. There's many
benefits to making this change. So many, that I myself wouldn't feel
qualified to enumerate them all. The Musl DNS code had to be changed
in order to support Windows of course, which looks very solid so far
At least in neovim, `│vi:` is not recognized as a modeline because it
has no preceding whitespace. After fixing this, opening a file yields
an error because `net` is not an option. (`noet`, however, is.)
- Introduce MAP_JIT which is zero on other platforms
- Invent __jit_begin() and __jit_end() which wrap Apple's APIs
- Runtime dispatch to sys_icache_invalidate() in __clear_cache()
- Use good ELF technique in cosmo_dlopen()
- Make strerror() conform more to other libc impls
- Introduce __clear_cache() and use it in cosmo_dlopen()
- Remove libc/fmt/fmt.h header (trying to kill off LIBC_FMT)
After hearing horror stories from a trusted colleague, I don't think
this is the kind of API we want to be supporting. Also SQLite wisdom
regarding fdatasync() has been added to the documentation.
- We now serialize the file descriptor table when spawning / executing
processes on Windows. This means you can now inherit more stuff than
just standard i/o. It's needed by bash, which duplicates the console
to file descriptor #255. We also now do a better job serializing the
environment variables, so you're less likely to encounter E2BIG when
using your bash shell. We also no longer coerce environ to uppercase
- execve() on Windows now remotely controls its parent process to make
them spawn a replacement for itself. Then it'll be able to terminate
immediately once the spawn succeeds, without having to linger around
for the lifetime as a shell process for proxying the exit code. When
process worker thread running in the parent sees the child die, it's
given a handle to the new child, to replace it in the process table.
- execve() and posix_spawn() on Windows will now provide CreateProcess
an explicit handle list. This allows us to remove handle locks which
enables better fork/spawn concurrency, with seriously correct thread
safety. Other codebases like Go use the same technique. On the other
hand fork() still favors the conventional WIN32 inheritence approach
which can be a little bit messy, but is *controlled* by guaranteeing
perfectly clean slates at both the spawning and execution boundaries
- sigset_t is now 64 bits. Having it be 128 bits was a mistake because
there's no reason to use that and it's only supported by FreeBSD. By
using the system word size, signal mask manipulation on Windows goes
very fast. Furthermore @asyncsignalsafe funcs have been rewritten on
Windows to take advantage of signal masking, now that it's much more
pleasant to use.
- All the overlapped i/o code on Windows has been rewritten for pretty
good signal and cancelation safety. We're now able to ensure overlap
data structures are cleaned up so long as you don't longjmp() out of
out of a signal handler that interrupted an i/o operation. Latencies
are also improved thanks to the removal of lots of "busy wait" code.
Waits should be optimal for everything except poll(), which shall be
the last and final demon we slay in the win32 i/o horror show.
- getrusage() on Windows is now able to report RUSAGE_CHILDREN as well
as RUSAGE_SELF, thanks to aggregation in the process manager thread.
The `cat` command now works properly, when run by itself on the bash
command prompt. It's working beautifully so far, and is only missing
a few keystrokes for clearing words and lines. Definitely works more
well than the one that ships with WIN32 :-)
- This change fixes a bug that allowed unbuffered printf() output (to
streams like stderr) to be truncated. This regression was introduced
some time between now and the last release.
- POSIX specifies all functions as thread safe by default. This change
works towards cleaning up our use of the @threadsafe / @threadunsafe
documentation annotations to reflect that. The goal is (1) to use
@threadunsafe to document functions which POSIX say needn't be thread
safe, and (2) use @threadsafe to document functions that we chose to
implement as thread safe even though POSIX didn't mandate it.
- Tidy up the clock_gettime() implementation. We're now trying out a
cleaner approach to system call support that aims to maintain the
Linux errno convention as long as possible. This also fixes bugs that
existed previously, where the vDSO errno wasn't being translated
properly. The gettimeofday() system call is now a wrapper for
clock_gettime(), which reduces bloat in apps that use both.
- The recently-introduced improvements to the execute bit on Windows has
had bugs fixed. access(X_OK) on a directory on Windows now succeeds.
fstat() will now perform the MZ/#! ReadFile() operation correctly.
- Windows.h is no longer included in libc/isystem/, because it confused
PCRE's build system into thinking Cosmopolitan is a WIN32 platform.
Cosmo's Windows.h polyfill was never even really that good, since it
only defines a subset of the subset of WIN32 APIs that Cosmo defines.
- The setlongerjmp() / longerjmp() APIs are removed. While they're nice
APIs that are superior to the standardized setjmp / longjmp functions,
they weren't superior enough to not be dead code in the monorepo. If
you use these APIs, please file an issue and they'll be restored.
- The .com appending magic has now been removed from APE Loader.
- Improved async signal safety of read() particularly for longjmp()
- Started adding cancel cleanup handlers for locks / etc on Windows
- Make /dev/tty work better particularly for uses like `foo | less`
- Eagerly read console input into a linked list, so poll can signal
- Fix some libc definitional bugs, which configure scripts detected
- Every unit test now passes on Apple Silicon. The final piece of this
puzzle was porting our POSIX threads cancelation support, since that
works differently on ARM64 XNU vs. AMD64. Our semaphore support on
Apple Silicon is also superior now compared to AMD64, thanks to the
grand central dispatch library which lets *NSYNC locks go faster.
- The Cosmopolitan runtime is now more stable, particularly on Windows.
To do this, thread local storage is mandatory at all runtime levels,
and the innermost packages of the C library is no longer being built
using ASAN. TLS is being bootstrapped with a 128-byte TIB during the
process startup phase, and then later on the runtime re-allocates it
either statically or dynamically to support code using _Thread_local.
fork() and execve() now do a better job cooperating with threads. We
can now check how much stack memory is left in the process or thread
when functions like kprintf() / execve() etc. call alloca(), so that
ENOMEM can be raised, reduce a buffer size, or just print a warning.
- POSIX signal emulation is now implemented the same way kernels do it
with pthread_kill() and raise(). Any thread can interrupt any other
thread, regardless of what it's doing. If it's blocked on read/write
then the killer thread will cancel its i/o operation so that EINTR can
be returned in the mark thread immediately. If it's doing a tight CPU
bound operation, then that's also interrupted by the signal delivery.
Signal delivery works now by suspending a thread and pushing context
data structures onto its stack, and redirecting its execution to a
trampoline function, which calls SetThreadContext(GetCurrentThread())
when it's done.
- We're now doing a better job managing locks and handles. On NetBSD we
now close semaphore file descriptors in forked children. Semaphores on
Windows can now be canceled immediately, which means mutexes/condition
variables will now go faster. Apple Silicon semaphores can be canceled
too. We're now using Apple's pthread_yield() funciton. Apple _nocancel
syscalls are now used on XNU when appropriate to ensure pthread_cancel
requests aren't lost. The MbedTLS library has been updated to support
POSIX thread cancelations. See tool/build/runitd.c for an example of
how it can be used for production multi-threaded tls servers. Handles
on Windows now leak less often across processes. All i/o operations on
Windows are now overlapped, which means file pointers can no longer be
inherited across dup() and fork() for the time being.
- We now spawn a thread on Windows to deliver SIGCHLD and wakeup wait4()
which means, for example, that posix_spawn() now goes 3x faster. POSIX
spawn is also now more correct. Like Musl, it's now able to report the
failure code of execve() via a pipe although our approach favors using
shared memory to do that on systems that have a true vfork() function.
- We now spawn a thread to deliver SIGALRM to threads when setitimer()
is used. This enables the most precise wakeups the OS makes possible.
- The Cosmopolitan runtime now uses less memory. On NetBSD for example,
it turned out the kernel would actually commit the PT_GNU_STACK size
which caused RSS to be 6mb for every process. Now it's down to ~4kb.
On Apple Silicon, we reduce the mandatory upstream thread size to the
smallest possible size to reduce the memory overhead of Cosmo threads.
The examples directory has a program called greenbean which can spawn
a web server on Linux with 10,000 worker threads and have the memory
usage of the process be ~77mb. The 1024 byte overhead of POSIX-style
thread-local storage is now optional; it won't be allocated until the
pthread_setspecific/getspecific functions are called. On Windows, the
threads that get spawned which are internal to the libc implementation
use reserve rather than commit memory, which shaves a few hundred kb.
- sigaltstack() is now supported on Windows, however it's currently not
able to be used to handle stack overflows, since crash signals are
still generated by WIN32. However the crash handler will still switch
to the alt stack, which is helpful in environments with tiny threads.
- Test binaries are now smaller. Many of the mandatory dependencies of
the test runner have been removed. This ensures many programs can do a
better job only linking the the thing they're testing. This caused the
test binaries for LIBC_FMT for example, to decrease from 200kb to 50kb
- long double is no longer used in the implementation details of libc,
except in the APIs that define it. The old code that used long double
for time (instead of struct timespec) has now been thoroughly removed.
- ShowCrashReports() is now much tinier in MODE=tiny. Instead of doing
backtraces itself, it'll just print a command you can run on the shell
using our new `cosmoaddr2line` program to view the backtrace.
- Crash report signal handling now works in a much better way. Instead
of terminating the process, it now relies on SA_RESETHAND so that the
default SIG_IGN behavior can terminate the process if necessary.
- Our pledge() functionality has now been fully ported to AARCH64 Linux.
- Invent openatemp() API
- Invent O_UNLINK open flag
- Introduce getenv_secure() API
- Remove `git pull` from cosmocc
- Fix utimes() when path is NULL
- Fix mktemp() to never return NULL
- Fix utimensat() UTIME_OMIT on XNU
- Improve utimensat() code for RHEL5
- Turn `argv[0]` C:/ to /C/ on Windows
- Introduce tmpnam() and tmpnam_r() APIs
- Fix more const issues with internal APIs
- Permit utimes() on WIN32 in O_RDONLY mode
- Fix fdopendir() to check fd is a directory
- Fix recent crash regression in landlock make
- Fix futimens(AT_FDCWD, NULL) to return EBADF
- Use workaround so `make -j` doesn't fork bomb
- Rename dontdiscard to __wur (just like glibc)
- Fix st_size for WIN32 symlinks containing UTF-8
- Introduce stdio ext APIs needed by GNU coreutils
- Fix lstat() on WIN32 for symlinks to directories
- Move some constants from normalize.inc to limits.h
- Fix segv with memchr() and memcmp() overlapping page
- Implement POSIX fflush() behavior for reader streams
- Implement AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW for utimensat() on WIN32
- Don't change read-only status of existing files on WIN32
- Correctly handle `0x[^[:xdigit:]]` case in strtol() functions
- Introduce ualarm() function
- Make rename() report EISEMPTY on Windows
- Always raise EINVAL upon open(O_RDONLY|O_TRUNC)
- Add macro so ./configure will detect SOCK_CLOEXEC
- Fix O_TRUNC without O_CREAT not working on Windows
- Let fcntl(F_SETFL) change O_APPEND status on Windows
- Make sure pwrite() / pread() report ESPIPE on sockets
- Raise ESPIPE on Windows when pwrite() is used on pipe
- Properly compute O_APPEND CreateFile() flags on Windows
- Don't require O_DIRECTORY to open directories on Windows
- Fix more instances of Windows reporting EISDIR and ENOTDIR
- Normalize EFTYPE and EMLINK to ELOOP on NetBSD and FreeBSD
- Make unlink() / rmdir() work on read-only files on Windows
- Validate UTF-8 on Windows paths to fix bug with overlong NUL
- Always print signal name to stderr when crashing due to SIG_DFL
- Fix Windows bug where denormalized paths >260 chars didn't work
- Block signals on BSDs when thread exits before trashing its own stack
