When polling sockets poll() can now let you know about an event in about
10µs rather than 10ms. If you're not polling sockets then poll() reports
console events now in microseconds instead of milliseconds.
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
Currently, in cosmopolitan, there is no handling of the current rounding
mode for long double conversions, such that round-to-nearest gets always
used, regardless of the current rounding mode. %Le also improperly calls
gdtoa with a too small precision (which led to relatively similar bugs).
This patch fixes these issues, in particular by modifying the FPI object
passed to gdtoa such that it is modifiable (so that __fmt can adjust its
rounding field to correspond to FLT_ROUNDS (note that this is not needed
for dtoa, which checks FLT_ROUNDS directly)) and ors STRTOG_Neg into the
kind field in both of the __fmt_dfpbits and __fmt_ldfpbits functions, as
the gdtoa function also depends on it to be able to accurately round any
negative arguments. The change to kind also requires a few other changes
to make sure kind's upper bits (which include STRTOG_Neg) are masked off
when attempting to only examine the lower bits' value. Furthermore, this
patch also makes exactly one change in gdtoa, which appears to be needed
to fix rounding issues with FE_TOWARDZERO (this seems like a gdtoa bug).
The patch also adds a few tests for these issues, along with also taking
the opportunity to clean up some of the previous tests to do the asserts
in the right order (i.e. with the first argument as the expected result,
and the second one being used as the value that it is compared against).
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.
Cosmopolitan's printf-family functions will currently crash if one tries
formatting a floating point number with a larger precision (large enough
that gdtoa attempts to allocate memory to format the number) while under
memory pressure (i.e. when malloc fails) because gdtoa fails to check if
malloc fails.
The added tests (which would previously crash under cosmopolitan without
this patch) show how to reproduce the issue.
This patch fixes this, and adds the aforementioned tests.
- 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 is believed to fix a crash, that's possible in nsync_waiter_free_()
when you call pthread_cond_timedwait(), or nsync_cv_wait_with_deadline()
where an assertion can fail. Thanks ipv4.games for helping me find this!
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.
We now have implement all of Musl's localization code, the same way that
Musl implements localization. You may need setlocale(LC_ALL, "C.UTF-8"),
just in case anything stops working as expected.
This change makes a second pass, at fixing the errno issue with libcxx's
filesystem code. Previously, 89.01% of LLVM's test suite was passing and
now 98.59% of their tests pass. Best of all, it's now possible for Clang
to be built as a working APE binary that can to compile the Cosmopolitan
repository. Please note it has only been vetted so far for some objects,
and more work would obviously need to be done in cosmo, to fix warnings.
This change solves an issue where many threads attempting to spawn forks
at once would cause fork() performance to degrade with the thread count.
Things got real nasty on NetBSD, which slowed down the whole test fleet,
because there's no vfork() and we're forced to use fork() in our server.
threads count task
1 1062 fork+exit+wait
2 668 fork+exit+wait
4 66 fork+exit+wait
8 19 fork+exit+wait
16 22 fork+exit+wait
32 16 fork+exit+wait
Things are now much less bad on NetBSD, but not great, since it does not
have futexes; we rely on its semaphore file descriptors to do conditions
threads count task
1 1085 fork+exit+wait
2 842 fork+exit+wait
4 532 fork+exit+wait
8 400 fork+exit+wait
16 276 fork+exit+wait
32 66 fork+exit+wait
With OpenBSD which also lacks vfork(), things were just as bad as NetBSD
threads count task
1 584 fork+exit+wait
2 687 fork+exit+wait
4 206 fork+exit+wait
8 24 fork+exit+wait
16 33 fork+exit+wait
32 26 fork+exit+wait
But since OpenBSD has futexes fork() works terrifically thanks to *NSYNC
threads count task
1 525 fork+exit+wait
2 580 fork+exit+wait
4 451 fork+exit+wait
8 479 fork+exit+wait
16 408 fork+exit+wait
32 373 fork+exit+wait
This issue would most likely only manifest itself, when pthread_atfork()
callers manage to slip a spin lock into the outermost position of fork's
list of locks. Since fork() is very slow, a spin lock can be devastating
Needless to say vfork() rules and anyone who says differently is kidding
themselves. Look at what a FreeBSD 14.1 virtual machine with equal specs
can do over the course of three hundred milliseconds.
threads count task
1 2559 vfork+exit+wait
2 5389 vfork+exit+wait
4 34933 vfork+exit+wait
8 43273 vfork+exit+wait
16 49648 vfork+exit+wait
32 40247 vfork+exit+wait
So it's a shame that so few OSes support vfork(). It creates an unsavory
situation, where someone wanting to build a server that spawns processes
would be better served to not use threads and favor a multiprocess model
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
