It appears that GetFileAttributes(u"\\etc\\passwd") can take two seconds
on Windows 10 at unpredictable times for reasons which are mysterious to
me. Let's try avoiding that path entirely and pray to Microsoft it works
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
This change gets printvideo working on aarch64. Performance improvements
have been introduced for magikarp decimation on aarch64. The last of the
old portable x86 intrinsics library is gone, but it still lives in Blink
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 fixes an issue with all system calls ending with *at(), when
the caller passes `dirfd != AT_FDCWD` and an absolute path. It's because
the old code was turning paths like C:\bin\ls into \\C:\bin\ls\C:\bin\ls
after being converted from paths like /C/bin/ls. I noticed this when the
Emacs dired mode stopped working. It's unclear if it's a regression with
Cosmopolitan Libc or if this was introduced by the Emacs v29 upgrade. It
also impacted posix_spawn() for which a newly minted example now exists.
- wcsstr() is now linearly complex
- strstr16() is now linearly complex
- strstr() is now vectorized on aarch64 (10x)
- strstr() now uses KMP on pathological cases
- memmem() is now vectorized on aarch64 (10x)
- memmem() now uses KMP on pathological cases
- Disable shared_ptr::owner_before until fixed
- Make iswlower(), iswupper() consistent with glibc
- Remove figure space from iswspace() implementation
- Include line and paragraph separator in iswcntrl()
- Use Musl wcwidth(), iswalpha(), iswpunct(), towlower(), towupper()
This change switches c++ exception handling from sjlj to standard dwarf.
It's needed because clang for aarch64 doesn't support sjlj. It turns out
that libunwind had a bare-metal configuration that made this easy to do.
This change gets the new experimental cosmocc -mclang flag in a state of
working so well that it can now be used to build all of llamafile and it
goes 3x faster in terms of build latency, without trading away any perf.
The int_fast16_t and int_fast32_t types are now always defined as 32-bit
in the interest of having more abi consistency between cosmocc -mgcc and
-mclang mode.
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.
It turns out sched_getcpu() didn't work on many platforms. So the system
call now has tests and is well documented. We now employ new workarounds
on platforms where it isn't supported in our malloc() implementation. It
was previously the case that malloc() was only scalable on Linux/Windows
for x86-64. Now the other platforms are scalable too.
This is a breaking change. It defines the new environment variable named
_COSMO_FDS_V2 which is used for inheriting non-stdio file descriptors on
execve() or posix_spawn(). No effort has been spent thus far integrating
with the older variable. If a new binary launches the older ones or vice
versa they'll only be able to pass stdin / stdout / stderr to each other
therefore it's important that you upgrade all your cosmo binaries if you
depend on this functionality. You'll be glad you did because inheritance
of file descriptors is more aligned with the POSIX standard than before.
This change ensures that if a file descriptor for an open disk file gets
shared by multiple processes within a process tree, then lseek() changes
will be visible across processes, and read() / write() are synchronized.
Note this only applies to Windows, because UNIX kernels already do this.
The cosmocc.zip toolchain will now include four builds of the libcosmo.a
runtime libraries. You can pass the -mdbg flag if you want to debug your
cosmopolitan runtime. You can pass the -moptlinux flag if you don't want
windows code lurking in your binary. See tool/cosmocc/README.md for more
details on how these flags may be used and their important implications.
- 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
