Every program built using Cosmopolitan is statically-linked. However
there are some cases, e.g. GUIs and video drivers, where linking the
host platform libraries is desirable. So what we do in such cases is
launch a stub executable using the host platform's libc, and longjmp
back into this executable. The stub executable passes back to us the
platform-specific dlopen() implementation, which we shall then wrap.
Here's the list of platforms that are supported so far:
- x86-64 Linux w/ Glibc
- x86-64 Linux w/ Musl Libc
- x86-64 FreeBSD
- x86-64 Windows
- aarch64 Linux w/ Glibc
- aarch64 MacOS
What this means is your Cosmo programs can call foreign functions on
your host operating system. However, it's important to note that any
foreign library you link won't have the ability to call functions in
your Cosmopolitan program. For example it's now technically possible
that Lua can load a module, however that almost certainly won't work
since the Lua module won't have access to Cosmo's Lua API.
Kudos to @jacereda for figuring out how to do this.
* [metal] Add a uprintf() routine, for non-emergency boot logging
* [metal] _Really_ push forward timing of VGA TTY initialization
* [metal] Do something useful with uprintf()
* [metal] Locate some ACPI tables, for later hardware detection
Specifically the code now tries to find the ACPI RSDP,
RSDT/XSDT, FADT, & MADT tables, whether in legacy BIOS
bootup mode or in a UEFI bootup. These are useful for
figuring out how to (re)enable asynchronous interrupts
in legacy 8259 PIC mode.
- 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.
- Fix stdio fmemopen() buffer behaviors
- Fix scanf() to return EOF when appropriate
- Prefer fseek/ftell names over fseeko/ftello
- Ensure locale field is always set in the TIB
- Fix recent regression in vfprintf() return count
- Make %n directive in scanf() have standard behavior
- Fix unused local variable errors
- Remove yoinks from sigaction() header
- Add nox87 and aarch64 to github actions
- Fix cosmocc -fportcosmo in linking mode
- It's now possible to build `make m=llvm o/llvm/libc`
If your main module has this declaration:
STATIC_YOINK("vga_console");
Then a VGA driver will be linked into your executable which
displays your stdio characters on the PC display, whereas
before we could only use the serial port. Your display is an
ANSI terminal and it's still a work in progress.
The whole repository is now buildable with GNU Make Landlock sandboxing.
This proves that no Makefile targets exist which touch files other than
their declared prerequisites. In order to do this, we had to:
1. Stop code morphing GCC output in package.com and instead run a
newly introduced FIXUPOBJ.COM command after GCC invocations.
2. Disable all the crumby Python unit tests that do things like create
files in the current directory, or rename() files between folders.
This ended up being a lot of tests, but most of them are still ok.
3. Introduce an .UNSANDBOXED variable to GNU Make to disable Landlock.
We currently only do this for things like `make tags`.
4. This change deletes some GNU Make code that was preventing the
execve() optimization from working. This means it should no longer
be necessary in most cases for command invocations to be indirected
through the cocmd interpreter.
5. Missing dependencies had to be declared in certain places, in cases
where they couldn't be automatically determined by MKDEPS.COM
6. The libcxx header situation has finally been tamed. One of the
things that makes this difficult is MKDEPS.COM only wants to
consider the first 64kb of a file, in order to go fast. But libcxx
likes to have #include lines buried after huge documentation.
7. An .UNVEIL variable has been introduced to GNU Make just in case
we ever wish to explicitly specify additional things that need to
be whitelisted which aren't strictly prerequisites. This works in
a manner similar to the recently introduced .EXTRA_PREREQS feature.
There's now a new build/bootstrap/make.com prebuilt binary available. It
should no longer be possible to write invalid Makefile code.
You can now use the hardest fastest and most dangerous language there is
with Cosmopolitan. So far about 75% of LLVM libcxx has been added. A few
breaking changes needed to be made to help this go smoothly.
- Rename nothrow to dontthrow
- Rename nodiscard to dontdiscard
- Add some libm functions, e.g. lgamma, nan, etc.
- Change intmax_t from int128 to int64 like everything else
- Introduce %jjd formatting directive for int128_t
- Introduce strtoi128(), strtou128(), etc.
- Rename bsrmax() to bsr128()
Some of the templates that should be working currently are std::vector,
std::string, std::map, std::set, std::deque, etc.
The libm code from musl wasn't being used since most of these functions
are implemented using x87 which goes faster than a library intended for
risc machines.
This is done without using Microsoft's internal APIs. MAP_PRIVATE
mappings are copied to the subprocess via a pipe, since Microsoft
doesn't want us to have proper COW pages. MAP_SHARED mappings are
remapped without needing to do any copying. Global variables need
copying along with the stack and the whole heap of anonymous mem.
This actually improves the reliability of the redbean http server
although one shouldn't expect 10k+ connections on a home computer
that isn't running software built to serve like Linux or FreeBSD.
I wanted a tiny scriptable meltdown proof way to run userspace programs
and visualize how program execution impacts memory. It helps to explain
how things like Actually Portable Executable works. It can show you how
the GCC generated code is going about manipulating matrices and more. I
didn't feel fully comfortable with Qemu and Bochs because I'm not smart
enough to understand them. I wanted something like gVisor but with much
stronger levels of assurances. I wanted a single binary that'll run, on
all major operating systems with an embedded GPL barrier ZIP filesystem
that is tiny enough to transpile to JavaScript and run in browsers too.
https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/emulator625.mp4
