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.
The new asynchronous signal delivery technique is now also being used
for tkill(), raise(), etc. Many subtle issues have been addresesd. We
now signal handling on Windows that's remarkably similar to the POSIX
behaviors. However that's just across threads. We're lacking a way to
have the signal semantics work well, across multiple WIN32 processes.
This change fixes Cosmopolitan so it has fewer opinions about compiler
warnings. The whole repository had to be cleaned up to be buildable in
-Werror -Wall mode. This lets us benefit from things like strict const
checking. Some actual bugs might have been caught too.
This change ports APE Loader to Linux AARCH64, so that Raspberry Pi
users can run programs like redbean, without the executable needing
to modify itself. Progress has also slipped into this change on the
issue of making progress better conforming to user expectations and
industry standards regarding which symbols we're allowed to declare
This change also incorporates more bug fixes and improvements to a wide
variety of small things. For example this fixes#860 so Windows console
doesn't get corrupted after exit. An system stack memory map issue with
aarch64 has been fixed. We no longer use O_NONBLOCK on AF_UNIX sockets.
Crash reports on Arm64 will now demangle C++ symbols, even when c++filt
isn't available. Most importantly the Apple M1 version of APE Loader is
brought up to date by this change. A prebuilt unsigned binary for it is
being included in build/bootstrap/. One more thing: retrieving the term
dimensions under --strace was causing the stack to become corrupted and
now that's been solved too. PSS: We're now including an ELF PT_NOTE for
APE in the binaries we build, that has the APE Loader version.
This change improves the way internal APIs are being hidden behind the
`COSMO` define. The cosmo.h header will take care of defining that, so
that a separate define statement isn't needed. This change also does a
lot more to define which APIs are standard, and which belong to Cosmo.
Garbage collection will now happen on arm64 when a function returns,
rather than kicking the can down the road to when the process exits.
This change also does some code cleanup and incorporates suggestions
Apparently IANA has abolished the WHOIS protocol and no longer lists it
as a service. Therefore distros which naively create /etc/services from
IANA's braindead recommendation will inadvertently break any tools that
rely on /etc/services to determine this well-known Internet port.
llama.com can now load weights that use the new file format which was
introduced a few weeks ago. Note that, unlike llama.cpp, we will keep
support for old file formats in our tool so you don't need to convert
your weights when the upstream project makes breaking changes. Please
note that using ggjt v3 does make avx2 inference go 5% faster for me.
This change progresses our AARCH64 support:
- The AARCH64 build and tests are now passing
- Add 128-bit floating-point support to printf()
- Fix clone() so it initializes cosmo's x28 TLS register
- Fix TLS memory layout issue with aarch64 _Alignas vars
- Revamp microbenchmarking tools so they work on aarch64
- Make some subtle improvements to aarch64 crash reporting
- Make kisdangerous() memory checks more accurate on aarch64
- Remove sys_open() since it's not available on Linux AARCH64
This change makes general improvements to Cosmo and Redbean:
- Introduce GetHostIsa() function in Redbean
- You can now feature check using pledge(0, 0)
- You can now feature check using unveil("",0)
- Refactor some more x86-specific asm comments
- Refactor and write docs for some libm functions
- Make the mmap() API behave more similar to Linux
- Fix WIFSIGNALED() which wrongly returned true for zero
- Rename some obscure cosmo keywords from noFOO to dontFOO
There's a new program named ape/ape-m1.c which will be used to build an
embeddable binary that can load ape and elf executables. The support is
mostly working so far, but still chasing down ABI issues.
It's now possible to run commands like:
make -j8 m=aarch64 o/aarch64/test/libc/str
Which will cross-compile and run the test suites in a qemu-aarch64
binary that's vendored in the third_party/qemu/ folder within your
x86_64 build environment.
The ShowCrashReports() feature for aarch64 should work even better than
the x86 crash reports. Thanks to the benefit of hindsight these reports
should be rock solid reliable and beautiful to read.
This change also improves the syscall polyfills for aarch64. Some of the
sys_foo() functions have been removed, usually because they're legacy or
downright footguns not worth building.
