Recursive mutexes now go as fast as normal mutexes. The tradeoff is they
are no longer safe to use in signal handlers. However you can still have
signal safe mutexes if you set your mutex to both recursive and pshared.
You can also make functions that use recursive mutexes signal safe using
sigprocmask to ensure recursion doesn't happen due to any signal handler
The impact of this change is that, on Windows, many functions which edit
the file descriptor table rely on recursive mutexes, e.g. open(). If you
develop your app so it uses pread() and pwrite() then your app should go
very fast when performing a heavily multithreaded and contended workload
For example, when scaling to 40+ cores, *NSYNC mutexes can go as much as
1000x faster (in CPU time) than the naive recursive lock implementation.
Now recursive will use *NSYNC under the hood when it's possible to do so
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.
We torture test dlmalloc() in test/libc/stdio/memory_test.c. That test
was crashing on occasion on Apple M1 microprocessors when dlmalloc was
using *NSYNC locks. It was relatively easy to spot the cause, which is
this one particular compare and swap operation, which needed to change
to use sequentially-consistent ordering rather than an acquire barrier
Thanks to @autumnjolitz (in #876) the Cosmopolitan codebase is now
acquainted with Apple's outstanding ulock system calls which offer
something much closer to futexes than Grand Central Dispatch which
wasn't quite as good, since its wait function can't be interrupted
by signals (therefore necessitating a busy loop) and it also needs
semaphore objects to be created and freed. Even though ulock is an
internal Apple API, strictly speaking, the benefits of futexes are
so great that it's worth the risk for now especially since we have
the GCD implementation still as a quick escape hatch if it changes
Here's why this change is important for x86 XNU users. Cosmo has a
suboptimal polyfill when the operating system doesn't offer an API
that let's us implement futexes properly. Sadly we had to use that
on X86 XNU until now. The polyfill works using clock_nanosleep, to
poll the futex in a busy loop with exponential backoff. On XNU x86
clock_nanosleep suffers from us not being able to use a fast clock
gettime implementation, which had a compounding effect that's made
the polyfill function even more poorly. On X86 XNU we also need to
polyfill sched_yield() using select(), which made things even more
troublesome. Now that we have futexes we don't have any busy loops
anymore for both condition variables and thread joining so optimal
performance is attained. To demonstrate, consider these benchmarks
Before:
$ ./lockscale_test.com -b
consumed 38.8377 seconds real time and
0.087131 seconds cpu time
After:
$ ./lockscale_test.com -b
consumed 0.007955 seconds real time and
0.011515 seconds cpu time
Fixes#876
- 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.
This changes *NSYNC to allocate waiters on the stack so our locks don't
need to depend on dynamic memory. This make our runtiem simpler, and it
also fixes bugs with thread cancellation support.
The *NSYNC linked list API is good enough that it deserves to be part of
the C libray, so this change writes an improved version of it which uses
that offsetof() trick from the Linux Kernel. We vendor all of the *NSYNC
tests in third_party which helped confirm the needed refactoring is safe
This change also deletes more old code that didn't pan out. My goal here
is to work towards a vision where the Cosmopolitan core libraries become
less experimental and more focused on curation. This better reflects the
current level of quality we've managed to achieve.
- Exhaustively document cancellation points
- Rename SIGCANCEL to SIGTHR just like BSDs
- Further improve POSIX thread cancellations
- Ensure asynchronous cancellations work correctly
- Elevate the quality of getrandom() and getentropy()
- Make futexes cancel correctly on OpenBSD 6.x and 7.x
- Add reboot.com and shutdown.com to examples directory
- Remove underscore prefix from awesome timespec_*() APIs
- Create assertions that help verify our cancellation points
- Remove bad timespec APIs (cmp generalizes eq/ne/gt/gte/lt/lte)
If threads are being used, then fork() will now acquire and release and
runtime locks so that fork() may be safely used from threads. This also
makes vfork() thread safe, because pthread mutexes will do nothing when
the process is a child of vfork(). More torture tests have been written
to confirm this all works like a charm. Additionally:
- Invent hexpcpy() api
- Rename nsync_malloc_() to kmalloc()
- Complete posix named semaphore implementation
- Make pthread_create() asynchronous signal safe
- Add rm, rmdir, and touch to command interpreter builtins
- Invent sigisprecious() and modify sigset functions to use it
- Add unit tests for posix_spawn() attributes and fix its bugs
One unresolved problem is the reclaiming of *NSYNC waiter memory in the
forked child processes, within apps which have threads waiting on locks
