- 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.
This change ports APE Loader to Linux AARCH64, so that Raspberry Pi
users can run programs like redbean, without the executable needing
to modify itself. Progress has also slipped into this change on the
issue of making progress better conforming to user expectations and
industry standards regarding which symbols we're allowed to declare
- compile.com now polyfills -march=native which gcc/clang removed
- Guarantee zero Windows code is linked into non-Windows binaries
- MODE=tinylinux binaries are now back to being as tiny as ~4kb
- Improve the runtime's stack allocation / alignment hack
- GitHub Actions now tests Linux modes for assurance
This fixes a bug where the caller's timeval will be clobbered on Linux.
The Kernel ABI *always* modifies the timeout argument but POSIX says it
should be a const parameter. The wrapper now handles the difference and
sys_select() may be used if obtaining the remainder on Linux is needed.
- Improve compatibility with Blink virtual machine
- Add non-POSIX APIs for joining threads and signal masks
- Never ever use anything except 32-bit integers for atomics
- Add some `#undef` statements to workaround `ctags` problems
- clock_nanosleep() is now much faster on OpenBSD and NetBSD
- Thread joining is now much faster on NetBSD
- FreeBSD timestamps are now more accurate
- Thread spawning now goes faster on XNU
- Clean up the clone() code
- Exhaustively document cancellation points
- Rename SIGCANCEL to SIGTHR just like BSDs
- Further improve POSIX thread cancellations
- Ensure asynchronous cancellations work correctly
- Elevate the quality of getrandom() and getentropy()
- Make futexes cancel correctly on OpenBSD 6.x and 7.x
- Add reboot.com and shutdown.com to examples directory
- Remove underscore prefix from awesome timespec_*() APIs
- Create assertions that help verify our cancellation points
- Remove bad timespec APIs (cmp generalizes eq/ne/gt/gte/lt/lte)
This change makes some miracle modifications to the System Five system
call support, which lets us have safe, correct, and atomic handling of
thread cancellations. It all turned out to be cheaper than anticipated
because it wasn't necessary to modify the system call veneers. We were
able to encode the cancellability of each system call into the magnums
found in libc/sysv/syscalls.sh. Since cancellations are so waq, we are
also supporting a lovely Musl Libc mask feature for raising ECANCELED.
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
