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
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.
While we have always licked glibc and musl libc on gnu/systemd sadly the
Apple Libc implementation of pthread_mutex_t is better than ours. It may
be due to how the XNU kernel and M2 microprocessor are in league when it
comes to scheduling processes and the NSYNC behavior is being penalized.
We can solve this by leaning more heavily on ulock using Drepper's algo.
It's kind of ironic that Linux's official mutexes work terribly on Linux
but almost as good as Apple Libc if used on MacOS.
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 implements the compiler runtime for ARM v8.1 ISE atomics and
gets rid of the mandatory -mno-outline-atomics flag. It can dramatically
speed things up, on newer ARM CPUs, as indicated by the changed lines in
test/libc/thread/footek_test.c. In llamafile dispatching on hwcap atomic
also shaved microseconds off synchronization barriers.
We now have implement all of Musl's localization code, the same way that
Musl implements localization. You may need setlocale(LC_ALL, "C.UTF-8"),
just in case anything stops working as expected.
It's been thirteen years and C++ still hasn't implemented this wonderful
simple builtin keyword. In C++23 a solution was provided for making this
work in C++ which is libcxx's stdatomic.h. Including that header schleps
in literally 253 unique header files!! Many of the header files it needs
are libc header files like pthread.h where we need to have the _Atomic()
keyword, but since <atomic> depends on pthreads we can't have it include
the <stdatomic.h> header that defines _Atomic for C++ users, and instead
we simply make the type non-atomic, hoping and praying only C code shall
use those internal data structures. This just shows how STL clowns can't
be trusted to define the innermost primitives of a language. They should
instead be focusing on being the best at algorithms and data structures.
- NetBSD should now have faster synchronization
- POSIX barriers may now be shared across processes
- An edge case with memory map tracking has been fixed
- Grand Central Dispatch is no longer used on MacOS ARM64
- POSIX mutexes in normal mode now use futexes across processes
- 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 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.
The memory leak detector was crashing. When using gc() you shouldn't use
the CheckForMemoryLeaks() function from inside the same function, due to
how it runs the atexit handlers.
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.
- Ensure SIGTHR isn't blocked in newly created threads
- Use TIB rather than thread_local for thread atexits
- Make POSIX thread keys atomic within thread
- Don't bother logging prctl() to --strace
- Log thread destructor names to --strace
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.
We now have a C++ red-black tree implementation that implements standard
template library compatible APIs while compiling 10x faster than libcxx.
It's not as beautiful as the red-black tree implementation in Plinko but
this will get the job done and the test proves it upholds all invariants
This change also restores CheckForMemoryLeaks() support and fixes a real
actual bug I discovered with Doug Lea's dlmalloc_inspect_all() function.
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.
🚨 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.
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.
This change adds a TLS freelist for small dynamic memory allocations.
Cosmopolitan's TIB is now 512 bytes in size. Single-threaded malloc()
performance isn't impacted by this, until pthread_create() is called.
Single-threaded programs may also want to consider using:
#include "libc/mem/tinymalloc.inc"
Which will shave 30k off the executable size and sometimes go faster.
