It's now possible to use execve() when the parent process isn't built by
cosmo. In such cases, the current process will kill all threads and then
linger around, waiting for the newly created process to die, and then we
propagate its exit code to the parent. This should help bazel and others
Allocating private anonymous memory is now 5x faster on Windows. This is
thanks to VirtualAlloc() which is faster than the file mapping APIs. The
fork() function also now goes 30% faster, since we are able to avoid the
VirtualProtect() calls on mappings in most cases now.
Fixes#1253
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
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.
C++ code compiles very slowly with cosmocc, possibly because we're using
LLVM LIBCXX with GCC, and LLVM doesn't work as hard to make GCC go fast.
Therefore, it should be possible, to ask cosmocc to favor Clang over GCC
under the hood. On llamafile, my intention's to use this to make certain
files, e.g. llama.cpp/common.cpp, go from taking 17 seconds to 5 seconds
This new -mclang flag isn't ready for production yet since there's still
the question of how to get Clang to generate SJLJ exception code. If you
use this, then it's recommended you also pass -fno-exceptions.
The tradeoff is we're adding a 121mb binary to the cosmocc distribution.
There are no plans as of yet to fully migrate to Clang since GCC is very
good and has always treated us well.
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
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.
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.
Microsoft caused some very gentle breakages for Cosmopolitan. They
removed the version information from the PEB which caused uname to
report WINDOWS 0.0.0. We should have called GetVersionExW but that
doesn't really exist anymore either. Windows policy is now to give
whatever version we used in ape/ape.S. Windows8 has been EOL since
2023-01-10 so lets avoid our modern executables being relegated to
legacy infrastructure. Requiring Windows 10+ going forward lets us
remove runtime compatibility bloat from the codebase. Further note
Cosmopolitan maintains a Windows Vista branch on GitHub, so anyone
preferring the older versions, can still have a future with Cosmo.
Another neat thing this fixes is UTF-8 support in the console. The
changes Microsoft made broke the if statement that enabled UTF8 in
terminals. This explains why bug reports had broken arrows. In the
future this should be less of an issue, since the PEB code is gone
which means we more strictly conform to only Microsoft's WIN32 API
It's now possible to safely print C++ backtraces from signal handlers.
This symbol demangler doesn't need malloc, tls, or even static memory.
Additionally, this change makes it 2x faster and adds test cases. It's
almost as performant and accurate as the libcxxabi implementation now.
- 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
Renaming gc() to _gc() was a mistake since the better thing to do is put
it behind the _COSMO_SOURCE macro. We need this change because I haven't
wanted to use my amazing garbage collector ever since we renamed it. You
now need to define _COSMO_SOURCE yourself when using amalgamation header
and cosmocc users need to pass the -mcosmo flag to get the gc() function
Some other issues relating to cancelation have been fixed along the way.
We're also now putting cosmocc in a folder named `.cosmocc` so it can be
more safely excluded by grep --exclude-dir=.cosmocc --exclude-dir=o etc.
The ape loader now passes the program executable name directly as a
register. `x2` is used on aarch64, `%rdx` on x86_64. This is passed
as the third argument to `cosmo()` (M1) or `Launch` (non-M1) and is
assigned to the global `__program_executable_name`.
`GetProgramExecutableName` now returns this global's value, setting
it if it is initially null. `InitProgramExecutableName` first tries
exotic, secure methods: `KERN_PROC_PATHNAME` on FreeBSD/NetBSD, and
`/proc` on Linux. If those produce a reasonable response (i.e., not
`"/usr/bin/ape"`, which happens with the loader before this change),
that is used. Otherwise, if `issetugid()`, the empty string is used.
Otherwise, the old argv/envp parsing code is run.
The value returned from the loader is always the full absolute path
of the binary to be executed, having passed through `realpath`. For
the non-M1 loader, this necessitated writing `RealPath`, which uses
`readlinkat` of `"/proc/self/fd/[progfd]"` on Linux, `F_GETPATH` on
Xnu, and the `__realpath` syscall on OpenBSD. On FreeBSD/NetBSD, it
punts to `GetProgramExecutableName`, which is secure on those OSes.
With the loader, all platforms now have a secure program executable
name. With no loader or an old loader, everything still works as it
did, but setuid/setgid is not supported if the insecure pathfinding
code would have been needed.
Fixes#991.
- Introduce MAP_JIT which is zero on other platforms
- Invent __jit_begin() and __jit_end() which wrap Apple's APIs
- Runtime dispatch to sys_icache_invalidate() in __clear_cache()
- Use good ELF technique in cosmo_dlopen()
- Make strerror() conform more to other libc impls
- Introduce __clear_cache() and use it in cosmo_dlopen()
- Remove libc/fmt/fmt.h header (trying to kill off LIBC_FMT)
We now have an `#include <cxxabi.h>` header which defines all the APIs
Cosmopolitan's implemented so far. The `cosmocc` README.md file is now
greatly expanded with documentation.
Our makefile generator now accepts badly formatted include lines. It's
now more hermetic with better error checking in the cosmo repo, and it
can be configured to not be hermetic at all.
- We now serialize the file descriptor table when spawning / executing
processes on Windows. This means you can now inherit more stuff than
just standard i/o. It's needed by bash, which duplicates the console
to file descriptor #255. We also now do a better job serializing the
environment variables, so you're less likely to encounter E2BIG when
using your bash shell. We also no longer coerce environ to uppercase
- execve() on Windows now remotely controls its parent process to make
them spawn a replacement for itself. Then it'll be able to terminate
immediately once the spawn succeeds, without having to linger around
for the lifetime as a shell process for proxying the exit code. When
process worker thread running in the parent sees the child die, it's
given a handle to the new child, to replace it in the process table.
- execve() and posix_spawn() on Windows will now provide CreateProcess
an explicit handle list. This allows us to remove handle locks which
enables better fork/spawn concurrency, with seriously correct thread
safety. Other codebases like Go use the same technique. On the other
hand fork() still favors the conventional WIN32 inheritence approach
which can be a little bit messy, but is *controlled* by guaranteeing
perfectly clean slates at both the spawning and execution boundaries
- sigset_t is now 64 bits. Having it be 128 bits was a mistake because
there's no reason to use that and it's only supported by FreeBSD. By
using the system word size, signal mask manipulation on Windows goes
very fast. Furthermore @asyncsignalsafe funcs have been rewritten on
Windows to take advantage of signal masking, now that it's much more
pleasant to use.
- All the overlapped i/o code on Windows has been rewritten for pretty
good signal and cancelation safety. We're now able to ensure overlap
data structures are cleaned up so long as you don't longjmp() out of
out of a signal handler that interrupted an i/o operation. Latencies
are also improved thanks to the removal of lots of "busy wait" code.
Waits should be optimal for everything except poll(), which shall be
the last and final demon we slay in the win32 i/o horror show.
- getrusage() on Windows is now able to report RUSAGE_CHILDREN as well
as RUSAGE_SELF, thanks to aggregation in the process manager thread.
- This change fixes a bug that allowed unbuffered printf() output (to
streams like stderr) to be truncated. This regression was introduced
some time between now and the last release.
- POSIX specifies all functions as thread safe by default. This change
works towards cleaning up our use of the @threadsafe / @threadunsafe
documentation annotations to reflect that. The goal is (1) to use
@threadunsafe to document functions which POSIX say needn't be thread
safe, and (2) use @threadsafe to document functions that we chose to
implement as thread safe even though POSIX didn't mandate it.
- Tidy up the clock_gettime() implementation. We're now trying out a
cleaner approach to system call support that aims to maintain the
Linux errno convention as long as possible. This also fixes bugs that
existed previously, where the vDSO errno wasn't being translated
properly. The gettimeofday() system call is now a wrapper for
clock_gettime(), which reduces bloat in apps that use both.
- The recently-introduced improvements to the execute bit on Windows has
had bugs fixed. access(X_OK) on a directory on Windows now succeeds.
fstat() will now perform the MZ/#! ReadFile() operation correctly.
- Windows.h is no longer included in libc/isystem/, because it confused
PCRE's build system into thinking Cosmopolitan is a WIN32 platform.
Cosmo's Windows.h polyfill was never even really that good, since it
only defines a subset of the subset of WIN32 APIs that Cosmo defines.
- The setlongerjmp() / longerjmp() APIs are removed. While they're nice
APIs that are superior to the standardized setjmp / longjmp functions,
they weren't superior enough to not be dead code in the monorepo. If
you use these APIs, please file an issue and they'll be restored.
- The .com appending magic has now been removed from APE Loader.
- Improved async signal safety of read() particularly for longjmp()
- Started adding cancel cleanup handlers for locks / etc on Windows
- Make /dev/tty work better particularly for uses like `foo | less`
- Eagerly read console input into a linked list, so poll can signal
- Fix some libc definitional bugs, which configure scripts detected
- 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.
- Remove misguided __assert_disabled variable
- Change EPROCLIM to be EAGAIN on BSD distros
- Improve quality of greenbean with cancellations
- Fix thread race condition crash with file descriptors
- Invent openatemp() API
- Invent O_UNLINK open flag
- Introduce getenv_secure() API
- Remove `git pull` from cosmocc
- Fix utimes() when path is NULL
- Fix mktemp() to never return NULL
- Fix utimensat() UTIME_OMIT on XNU
- Improve utimensat() code for RHEL5
- Turn `argv[0]` C:/ to /C/ on Windows
- Introduce tmpnam() and tmpnam_r() APIs
- Fix more const issues with internal APIs
- Permit utimes() on WIN32 in O_RDONLY mode
- Fix fdopendir() to check fd is a directory
- Fix recent crash regression in landlock make
- Fix futimens(AT_FDCWD, NULL) to return EBADF
- Use workaround so `make -j` doesn't fork bomb
- Rename dontdiscard to __wur (just like glibc)
- Fix st_size for WIN32 symlinks containing UTF-8
- Introduce stdio ext APIs needed by GNU coreutils
- Fix lstat() on WIN32 for symlinks to directories
- Move some constants from normalize.inc to limits.h
- Fix segv with memchr() and memcmp() overlapping page
- Implement POSIX fflush() behavior for reader streams
- Implement AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW for utimensat() on WIN32
- Don't change read-only status of existing files on WIN32
- Correctly handle `0x[^[:xdigit:]]` case in strtol() functions
- Get SIGWINCH working again on the New Technology
- Correctly handle O_NOFOLLOW in open() on Windows
- Implement synthetic umask() functionality on Windows
- Do a better job managing file execute access on Windows
- Fill in `st_uid` and `st_gid` with username hash on Windows
- Munge UNICODE control pictures into control codes on Windows
- Do a better job ensuring Windows console settings are restored
- Introduce KPRINTF_LOG environment variable to log kprintf to a file
This change reduces the memory requirements of your APE Loader by 10x,
in terms of virtual memory size, thanks to the help of alloca(). We're
also now creating argument blocks with the same layout across systems.
- Fix mkdeps.com out of memory error
- Remove static memory from __get_cpu_count()
- Add support for passing hyphen to cat in cocmd
- Change more ZipOS errors from ENOTSUP to EROFS
- Specify mem_unit in sysinfo() output on BSD OSes
- Fix handling of precision in hex float formatting
- Enhance the cocmd interpreter for system() and popen()
- Manually ran the Lua unit tests, which are now passing
- Let stdio i/o operations happen when file is in error state
- We're now saving and restoring xmm in ftrace out of paranoia
The *NSYNC linked list API is good enough that it deserves to be part of
the C libray, so this change writes an improved version of it which uses
that offsetof() trick from the Linux Kernel. We vendor all of the *NSYNC
tests in third_party which helped confirm the needed refactoring is safe
This change also deletes more old code that didn't pan out. My goal here
is to work towards a vision where the Cosmopolitan core libraries become
less experimental and more focused on curation. This better reflects the
current level of quality we've managed to achieve.
After going through the MODE=dbg and MODE=zero build modes, a bunch of
little issues were identified, which have been addressed. Fixing those
issues created even more troubles for the project, because it improved
our ability to detect latent problems which are getting fixed so fast.
This change introduces support for Linux-style uc_context manipulation
that's fast and works well on all supported OSes and architectures. It
also integrates with the Cosmpolitan runtime which can show backtraces
comprised of multiple stacks and fibers. See the test and example code
for further details. This will be used by Mold once it's been vendored
- More timspec_*() and timeval_*() APIs have been introduced.
- The copyfd() function is now simplified thanks to POSIX rules.
- More Cosmo-specific APIs have been moved behind the COSMO define.
- The setitimer() polyfill for Windows NT is now much higher quality.
- Fixed build error for MODE=aarch64 due to -mstringop-strategy=loop.
- This change introduces `make MODE=nox87 toolchain` which makes it
possible to build programs using your cosmocc toolchain that don't
have legacy fpu instructions. This is useful, for example, if you
want to have a ~22kb tinier blink virtual machine.
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.
In order to improve our chances of success building other open source
projects we shouldn't define APIs that'll lead any ./configure script
astray. For example:
- brk() and sbrk() can break mac/windows support
- syscall() is a superb way to break portability
- arch_prctl() is the greatest of all horror shows
- Work towards improving non-optimized build support
- Introduce MODE=zero which is -O0 without ASAN/UBSAN
- Use system GCC when ~/.cosmo.mk has USE_SYSTEM_TOOLCHAIN=1
- Have package.com check .privileged code doesn't call non-privileged
