- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- Fix preadv() and pwritev() for old distros
- Introduce _npassert() and _unassert() macros
- Prove that file locks work properly on Windows
- Support fcntl(F_DUPFD_CLOEXEC) on more systems
- Get clone() working on FreeBSD
- Increase some Python build quotas
- Add more atomic builtins to chibicc
- Fix ASAN poisoning of alloca() memory
- Make MODE= mandatory link path tinier
- Improve the examples folder a little bit
- Start working on some more resource limits
- Make the linenoise auto-complete UI as good as GNU readline
- Update compile.com, avoiding AVX codegen on non-AVX systems
- Make sure empty path to syscalls like opendir raises ENOENT
- Correctly polyfill ENOENT vs. ENOTDIR on the New Technology
- Port bestline's paredit features to //third_party/linenoise
- Remove workarounds for RHEL 5.0 bugs that were fixed in 5.1
- Fix bugs in kDos2Errno definition
- malloc() should now be thread safe
- Fix bug in rollup.com header generator
- Fix open(O_APPEND) on the New Technology
- Fix select() on the New Technology and test it
- Work towards refactoring i/o for thread safety
- Socket reads and writes on NT now poll for signals
- Work towards i/o completion ports on the New Technology
- Make read() and write() intermittently check for signals
- Blinkenlights keyboard i/o so much better on NT w/ poll()
- You can now poll() files and sockets at the same time on NT
- Fix bug in appendr() that manifests with dlmalloc footers off
- Python static hello world now 1.8mb
- Python static fully loaded now 10mb
- Python HTTPS client now uses MbedTLS
- Python REPL now completes import stmts
- Increase stack size for Python for now
- Begin synthesizing posixpath and ntpath
- Restore Python \N{UNICODE NAME} support
- Restore Python NFKD symbol normalization
- Add optimized code path for Intel SHA-NI
- Get more Python unit tests passing faster
- Get Python help() pagination working on NT
- Python hashlib now supports MbedTLS PBKDF2
- Make memcpy/memmove/memcmp/bcmp/etc. faster
- Add Mersenne Twister and Vigna to LIBC_RAND
- Provide privileged __printf() for error code
- Fix zipos opendir() so that it reports ENOTDIR
- Add basic chmod() implementation for Windows NT
- Add Cosmo's best functions to Python cosmo module
- Pin function trace indent depth to that of caller
- Show memory diagram on invalid access in MODE=dbg
- Differentiate stack overflow on crash in MODE=dbg
- Add stb_truetype and tools for analyzing font files
- Upgrade to UNICODE 13 and reduce its binary footprint
- COMPILE.COM now logs resource usage of build commands
- Start implementing basic poll() support on bare metal
- Set getauxval(AT_EXECFN) to GetModuleFileName() on NT
- Add descriptions to strerror() in non-TINY build modes
- Add COUNTBRANCH() macro to help with micro-optimizations
- Make error / backtrace / asan / memory code more unbreakable
- Add fast perfect C implementation of μ-Law and a-Law audio codecs
- Make strtol() functions consistent with other libc implementations
- Improve Linenoise implementation (see also github.com/jart/bestline)
- COMPILE.COM now suppresses stdout/stderr of successful build commands
We can now link even smaller Python binaries. For example, the hello.com
program in the Python build directory is a compiled linked executable of
hello.py which just prints hello world. Using decentralized sections, we
can make that binary 1.9mb in size (noting that python.com is 6.3 megs!)
This works for nontrivial programs too. For example, say we want an APE
binary that's equivalent to python.com -m http.server. Our makefile now
builds such a binary using the new launcher and it's only 3.2mb in size
since Python sources get turned into ELF objects, which tell our linker
that we need things like native hashing algorithm code.
Actually Portable Python is now outperforming the Python binaries
that come bundled with Linux distros, at things like HTTP serving.
You can now have a fully featured Python install in just one .com
file that runs on six operating systems and is about 10mb in size.
With tuning, the tiniest is ~1mb. We've got most of the libraries
working, including pysqlite, and the repl now feels very pleasant.
The things you can't do quite yet are: threads and shared objects
but that can happen in the future, if the community falls in love
with this project and wants to see it developed further. Changes:
- Add siginterrupt()
- Add sqlite3 to Python
- Add issymlink() helper
- Make GetZipCdir() faster
- Add tgamma() and finite()
- Add legacy function lutimes()
- Add readlink() and realpath()
- Use heap allocations when appropriate
- Reorganize Python into two-stage build
- Save Lua / Python shell history to dotfile
- Integrate Python Lib embedding into linkage
- Make isregularfile() and isdirectory() go faster
- Make Python shell auto-completion work perfectly
- Make crash reports work better if changed directory
- Fix Python+NT open() / access() flag overflow error
- Disable Python tests relating to \N{LONG NAME} syntax
- Have Python REPL copyright() show all notice embeddings
The biggest technical challenge at the moment is working around
when Python tries to be too clever about filenames.
We always favor calling functions like openat(), fstatat(), etc. because
Linux, XNU, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD all elected to support them, while some
systems like Android love them so much, that they stopped supporting the
old interfaces.
This change ensures that when dirfd is actually a dirfd and not AT_FDCWD
we'll do the right thing on Windows NT. We use an API that's been around
since Vista to accomplish that.
This change also adds exponential backoff to chdir() on Windows since it
seems almost as flaky on Windows 7 as the rmdir() function.
A new rollup tool now exists for flattening out the headers in a way
that works better for our purposes than cpp. A lot of the API clutter
has been removed. APIs that aren't a sure thing in terms of general
recommendation are now marked internal.
There's now a smoke test for the amalgamation archive and gigantic
header file. So we can now guarantee you can use this project on the
easiest difficulty setting without the gigantic repository.
A website is being created, which is currently a work in progress:
https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/cosmopolitan/index.html
I wanted a tiny scriptable meltdown proof way to run userspace programs
and visualize how program execution impacts memory. It helps to explain
how things like Actually Portable Executable works. It can show you how
the GCC generated code is going about manipulating matrices and more. I
didn't feel fully comfortable with Qemu and Bochs because I'm not smart
enough to understand them. I wanted something like gVisor but with much
stronger levels of assurances. I wanted a single binary that'll run, on
all major operating systems with an embedded GPL barrier ZIP filesystem
that is tiny enough to transpile to JavaScript and run in browsers too.
https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/emulator625.mp4
