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.
We torture test dlmalloc() in test/libc/stdio/memory_test.c. That test
was crashing on occasion on Apple M1 microprocessors when dlmalloc was
using *NSYNC locks. It was relatively easy to spot the cause, which is
this one particular compare and swap operation, which needed to change
to use sequentially-consistent ordering rather than an acquire barrier
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.
- On Windows connect() can now be interrupted by a signal; connect() w/
O_NONBLOCK will now raise EINPROGRESS; and connect() with SO_SNDTIMEO
will raise ETIMEDOUT after the interval has elapsed.
- We now get the AcceptEx(), ConnectEx(), and TransmitFile() functions
from the WIN32 API the officially blessed way, using WSAIoctl().
- Do nothing on Windows when fsync() is called on a directory handle.
This was raising EACCES earlier becaues GENERIC_WRITE is required on
the handle. It's possible to FlushFileBuffers() a directory handle if
it's opened with write access but MSDN doesn't document what it does.
If you have any idea, please let us know!
- Prefer manual reset event objects for read() and write() on Windows.
- Do some code cleanup on our dlmalloc customizations.
- Fix errno type error in Windows blocking routines.
- Make the futex polyfill simpler and faster.
If threads are being used, then fork() will now acquire and release and
runtime locks so that fork() may be safely used from threads. This also
makes vfork() thread safe, because pthread mutexes will do nothing when
the process is a child of vfork(). More torture tests have been written
to confirm this all works like a charm. Additionally:
- Invent hexpcpy() api
- Rename nsync_malloc_() to kmalloc()
- Complete posix named semaphore implementation
- Make pthread_create() asynchronous signal safe
- Add rm, rmdir, and touch to command interpreter builtins
- Invent sigisprecious() and modify sigset functions to use it
- Add unit tests for posix_spawn() attributes and fix its bugs
One unresolved problem is the reclaiming of *NSYNC waiter memory in the
forked child processes, within apps which have threads waiting on locks
This change addresses various open source compatibility issues, so that
we pass 313/411 of the tests in https://github.com/jart/libc-test where
earlier today we were passing about 30/411 of them, due to header toil.
Please note that Glibc only passes 341/411 so 313 today is pretty good!
- Make the conformance of libc/isystem/ headers nearly perfect
- Import more of the remaining math library routines from Musl
- Fix inconsistencies with type signatures of calls like umask
- Write tests for getpriority/setpriority which work great now
- conform to `struct sockaddr *` on remaining socket functions
- Import a bunch of uninteresting stdlib functions e.g. rand48
- Introduce readdir_r, scandir, pthread_kill, sigsetjmp, etc..
Follow the instructions in our `tool/scripts/cosmocc` toolchain to run
these tests yourself. You use `make CC=cosmocc` on the test repository
This makes breaking changes to add underscores to many non-standard
function names provided by the c library. MODE=tiny is now tinier and
we now use smaller locks that are better for tiny apps in this mode.
Some headers have been renamed to be in the same folder as the build
package, so it'll be easier to know which build dependency is needed.
Certain old misguided interfaces have been removed. Intel intrinsics
headers are now listed in libc/isystem (but not in the amalgamation)
to help further improve open source compatibility. Header complexity
has also been reduced. Lastly, more shell scripts are now available.
The organization of the source files is now much more rational.
Old experiments that didn't work out are now deleted. Naming of
things like files is now more intuitive.
pthread_mutex_lock() now uses a better algorithm which goes much faster
in multithreaded environments that have lock contention. This comes at
the cost of adding some fixed-cost overhead to mutex invocations. That
doesn't matter for Cosmopolitan because our core libraries all encode
locking operations as NOP instructions when in single-threaded mode.
Overhead only applies starting the moment you first call clone().
We had previously not enabled TLS in MODE=tiny in order to keep the
smallest example programs (e.g. life.com) just 16kb in size. But it
was error prone doing that, so now we just always enable it because
this change uses hacks to ensure it won't increase life.com's size.
This change also fixes a bug on NetBSD, where signal handlers would
break thread local storage if SA_SIGINFO was being used. This looks
like it might be a bug in NetBSD, but it's got a simple workaround.
- Finish cleaning up the stdio unlocked APIs
- Make __cxa_finalize() properly thread safe
- Don't log locks if threads aren't being used
- Add some more mutex guards to places using _mmi
- Specific lock names now appear in the --ftrace logs
- Fix mkdeps.com generating invalid Makefiles sometimes
- Simplify and fix bugs in the test runner infrastructure
- Fix issue where sometimes some functions wouldn't be logged