So far I haven't found any way to run native Arm64 code on Windows Arm64
without using MSVC. When I build a PE binary from scratch that should be
a valid Windows Arm64 program, the OS refuses to run it. Possibly due to
requiring additional content like XML manifests or relocation or control
flow integrity data that isn't normally required on x64. I've also tried
using VirtualAlloc2() to JIT an Arm64 native function, but VirtualAlloc2
always fails with invalid parameter. I tried using MSVC to create an ARM
DLL that my x64 emulated program can link at runtime, to pass a function
pointer with ARM code, but LoadLibrary() rejects ARM DLLs as invalid exe
The only option left, is likely to write a new program like ape/ape-m1.c
which can be compiled by MSVC to load and run an AARCH64 ELF executable.
The emulated x64 binary would detect emulation using IsWow64Process2 and
then drop the loader executable in a temporary folder, and re-launch the
original executable, using the Arm64 segments of the cosmocc fat binary.
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.
Cosmopolitan now supports 104 time zones. They're embedded inside any
binary that links the localtime() function. Doing so adds about 100kb
to the binary size. This change also gets time zones working properly
on Windows for the first time. It's not needed to have /etc/localtime
exist on Windows, since we can get this information from WIN32. We're
also now updated to the latest version of Paul Eggert's TZ library.
The WIN32 CreateProcess() function does not require an .exe or .com
suffix in order to spawn an executable. Now that we have Cosmo bash
we're no longer so dependent on the cmd.exe prompt.
- 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
If you install qemu-user from apt then glibc links a lot of address
space bloat that causes pthread_create() to ENOMEM (a.k.a. EAGAIN).
Boosting the virtual memory quota from 512m to 2048m will hopefully
future proof the build for the future, as Linux distros get fatter.
Please note this only applies to MODE=aarch64 on x86_64 builds when
you're using QEMU from Debian/Ubuntu rather than installing the one
cosmo provides in third_party/qemu/qemu-aarch64.gz. This change may
also be useful to people who are using the host compiler toolchain.
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
Somehow or another, I previously had missed `BUILD.mk` files.
In the process I found a few straggler cases where the modeline was
different from the file, including one very involved manual fix where a
file had been treated like it was ts=2 and ts=8 on separate occasions.
The commit history in the PR shows the gory details; the BUILD.mk was
automated, everything else was mostly manual.
