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
This change fixes a bug where nsync waiter objects would leak. It'd mean
that long-running programs like runitd would run out of file descriptors
on NetBSD where waiter objects have ksem file descriptors. On other OSes
this bug is mostly harmless since the worst that can happen with a futex
is to leak a little bit of ram. The bug was caused because tib_nsync was
sneaking back in after the finalization code had cleared it. This change
refactors the thread exiting code to handle nsync teardown appropriately
and in making this change I found another issue, which is that user code
which is buggy, and tries to exit without joining joinable threads which
haven't been detached, would result in a deadlock. That doesn't sound so
bad, except the main thread is a joinable thread. So this deadlock would
be triggered in ways that put libc at fault. So we now auto-join threads
and libc will log a warning to --strace when that happens for any thread
This change doubles the performance of thread spawning. That's thanks to
our new stack manager, which allows us to avoid zeroing stacks. It gives
us 15µs spawns rather than 30µs spawns on Linux. Also, pthread_exit() is
faster now, since it doesn't need to acquire the pthread GIL. On NetBSD,
that helps us avoid allocating too many semaphores. Even if that happens
we're now able to survive semaphores running out and even memory running
out, when allocating *NSYNC waiter objects. I found a lot more rare bugs
in the POSIX threads runtime that could cause things to crash, if you've
got dozens of threads all spawning and joining dozens of threads. I want
cosmo to be world class production worthy for 2025 so happy holidays all
This change introduces a new deadlock detector for Cosmo's POSIX threads
implementation. Error check mutexes will now track a DAG of nested locks
and report EDEADLK when a deadlock is theoretically possible. These will
occur rarely, but it's important for production hardening your code. You
don't even need to change your mutexes to use the POSIX error check mode
because `cosmocc -mdbg` will enable error checking on mutexes by default
globally. When cycles are found, an error message showing your demangled
symbols describing the strongly connected component are printed and then
the SIGTRAP is raised, which means you'll also get a backtrace if you're
using ShowCrashReports() too. This new error checker is so low-level and
so pure that it's able to verify the relationships of every libc runtime
lock, including those locks upon which the mutex implementation depends.
It's now possible with cosmo and redbean, to deliver a signal to a child
process after it has called execve(). However the executed program needs
to be compiled using cosmocc. The cosmo runtime WinMain() implementation
now intercepts a _COSMO_PID environment variable that's set by execve().
It ensures the child process will use the same C:\ProgramData\cosmo\sigs
file, which is where kill() will place the delivered signal. We are able
to do this on Windows even better than NetBSD, which has a bug with this
Fixes#1334
On Windows, sometimes fork() could crash with message likes:
fork() ViewOrDie(170000) failed with win32 error 487
This is due to a bug in our file descriptor inheritance. We have cursors
which are shared between processes. They let us track the file positions
of read() and write() operations. At startup they were being mmap()ed to
memory addresses that were assigned by WIN32. That's bad because Windows
likes to give us memory addresses beneath the program image in the first
4mb range that are likely to conflict with other assignments. That ended
up causing problems because fork() needs to be able to assume that a map
will be possible to resurrect at the same address. But for one reason or
another, Windows libraries we don't control could sneak allocations into
the memory space that overlap with these mappings. This change solves it
by choosing a random memory address instead when mapping cursor objects.
This change gets rsync working without any warning or errors. On Windows
we now create a bunch of C:\var\sig\x\y.pid shared memory files, so sigs
can be delivered between processes. WinMain() creates this file when the
process starts. If the program links signaling system calls then we make
a thread at startup too, which allows asynchronous delivery each quantum
and cancelation points can spot these signals potentially faster on wait
See #1240
This change along with a patch for rsync's safe_write() function that'll
that'll soon be added to superconfigure, gets rsync working. There's one
remaining issue (which isn't a blocker) which is how rsync logs an error
about abnormal process termination since there's currently no way for us
to send non-fatal signals between processes. rsync in cosmos is restored
Fixes#1240
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.
This change fixes an issue with all system calls ending with *at(), when
the caller passes `dirfd != AT_FDCWD` and an absolute path. It's because
the old code was turning paths like C:\bin\ls into \\C:\bin\ls\C:\bin\ls
after being converted from paths like /C/bin/ls. I noticed this when the
Emacs dired mode stopped working. It's unclear if it's a regression with
Cosmopolitan Libc or if this was introduced by the Emacs v29 upgrade. It
also impacted posix_spawn() for which a newly minted example now exists.
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.
This change ensures that if a file descriptor for an open disk file gets
shared by multiple processes within a process tree, then lseek() changes
will be visible across processes, and read() / write() are synchronized.
Note this only applies to Windows, because UNIX kernels already do this.
This change solves an issue where many threads attempting to spawn forks
at once would cause fork() performance to degrade with the thread count.
Things got real nasty on NetBSD, which slowed down the whole test fleet,
because there's no vfork() and we're forced to use fork() in our server.
threads count task
1 1062 fork+exit+wait
2 668 fork+exit+wait
4 66 fork+exit+wait
8 19 fork+exit+wait
16 22 fork+exit+wait
32 16 fork+exit+wait
Things are now much less bad on NetBSD, but not great, since it does not
have futexes; we rely on its semaphore file descriptors to do conditions
threads count task
1 1085 fork+exit+wait
2 842 fork+exit+wait
4 532 fork+exit+wait
8 400 fork+exit+wait
16 276 fork+exit+wait
32 66 fork+exit+wait
With OpenBSD which also lacks vfork(), things were just as bad as NetBSD
threads count task
1 584 fork+exit+wait
2 687 fork+exit+wait
4 206 fork+exit+wait
8 24 fork+exit+wait
16 33 fork+exit+wait
32 26 fork+exit+wait
But since OpenBSD has futexes fork() works terrifically thanks to *NSYNC
threads count task
1 525 fork+exit+wait
2 580 fork+exit+wait
4 451 fork+exit+wait
8 479 fork+exit+wait
16 408 fork+exit+wait
32 373 fork+exit+wait
This issue would most likely only manifest itself, when pthread_atfork()
callers manage to slip a spin lock into the outermost position of fork's
list of locks. Since fork() is very slow, a spin lock can be devastating
Needless to say vfork() rules and anyone who says differently is kidding
themselves. Look at what a FreeBSD 14.1 virtual machine with equal specs
can do over the course of three hundred milliseconds.
threads count task
1 2559 vfork+exit+wait
2 5389 vfork+exit+wait
4 34933 vfork+exit+wait
8 43273 vfork+exit+wait
16 49648 vfork+exit+wait
32 40247 vfork+exit+wait
So it's a shame that so few OSes support vfork(). It creates an unsavory
situation, where someone wanting to build a server that spawns processes
would be better served to not use threads and favor a multiprocess model
The cosmocc.zip toolchain will now include four builds of the libcosmo.a
runtime libraries. You can pass the -mdbg flag if you want to debug your
cosmopolitan runtime. You can pass the -moptlinux flag if you don't want
windows code lurking in your binary. See tool/cosmocc/README.md for more
details on how these flags may be used and their important implications.
Cosmopolitan Libc once called this important function although somewhere
along the way, possibly in a refactoring, it got removed and __tls_alloc
has always been zero ever since.
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
This change reduces o/tiny/examples/life from 44kb to 24kb in size since
it avoids linking mmap() when unnecessary. This is important, to helping
cosmo not completely lose touch with its roots.
This fixes a regression in mmap(MAP_FIXED) on Windows caused by a recent
revision. This change also fixes ZipOS so it no longer needs a MAP_FIXED
mapping to open files from the PKZIP store. The memory mapping mutex was
implemented incorrectly earlier which meant that ftrace and strace could
cause cause crashes. This lock and other recursive mutexes are rewritten
so that it should be provable that recursive mutexes in cosmopolitan are
asynchronous signal safe.
