This change fixes a bug where nsync waiter objects would leak. It'd mean
that long-running programs like runitd would run out of file descriptors
on NetBSD where waiter objects have ksem file descriptors. On other OSes
this bug is mostly harmless since the worst that can happen with a futex
is to leak a little bit of ram. The bug was caused because tib_nsync was
sneaking back in after the finalization code had cleared it. This change
refactors the thread exiting code to handle nsync teardown appropriately
and in making this change I found another issue, which is that user code
which is buggy, and tries to exit without joining joinable threads which
haven't been detached, would result in a deadlock. That doesn't sound so
bad, except the main thread is a joinable thread. So this deadlock would
be triggered in ways that put libc at fault. So we now auto-join threads
and libc will log a warning to --strace when that happens for any thread
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.
- 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
It's now possible to create thousands of thousands of sparse independent
memory mappings, without any slowdown. The memory manager is better with
tracking memory protection now, particularly on Windows in a precise way
that can be restored during fork(). You now have the highest quality mem
manager possible. It's even better than some OSes like XNU, where mmap()
is implemented as an O(n) operation which means sadly things aren't much
improved over there. With this change the llamafile HTTP server endpoint
at /tokenize with a prompt of 50 tokens is now able to handle 2.6m r/sec
This change upgrades to GCC 12.3 and GNU binutils 2.42. The GNU linker
appears to have changed things so that only a single de-duplicated str
table is present in the binary, and it gets placed wherever the linker
wants, regardless of what the linker script says. To cope with that we
need to stop using .ident to embed licenses. As such, this change does
significant work to revamp how third party licenses are defined in the
codebase, using `.section .notice,"aR",@progbits`.
This new GCC 12.3 toolchain has support for GNU indirect functions. It
lets us support __target_clones__ for the first time. This is used for
optimizing the performance of libc string functions such as strlen and
friends so far on x86, by ensuring AVX systems favor a second codepath
that uses VEX encoding. It shaves some latency off certain operations.
It's a useful feature to have for scientific computing for the reasons
explained by the test/libcxx/openmp_test.cc example which compiles for
fifteen different microarchitectures. Thanks to the upgrades, it's now
also possible to use newer instruction sets, such as AVX512FP16, VNNI.
Cosmo now uses the %gs register on x86 by default for TLS. Doing it is
helpful for any program that links `cosmo_dlopen()`. Such programs had
to recompile their binaries at startup to change the TLS instructions.
That's not great, since it means every page in the executable needs to
be faulted. The work of rewriting TLS-related x86 opcodes, is moved to
fixupobj.com instead. This is great news for MacOS x86 users, since we
previously needed to morph the binary every time for that platform but
now that's no longer necessary. The only platforms where we need fixup
of TLS x86 opcodes at runtime are now Windows, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. On
Windows we morph TLS to point deeper into the TIB, based on a TlsAlloc
assignment, and on OpenBSD/NetBSD we morph %gs back into %fs since the
kernels do not allow us to specify a value for the %gs register.
OpenBSD users are now required to use APE Loader to run Cosmo binaries
and assimilation is no longer possible. OpenBSD kernel needs to change
to allow programs to specify a value for the %gs register, or it needs
to stop marking executable pages loaded by the kernel as mimmutable().
This release fixes __constructor__, .ctor, .init_array, and lastly the
.preinit_array so they behave the exact same way as glibc.
We no longer use hex constants to define math.h symbols like M_PI.
At least in neovim, `│vi:` is not recognized as a modeline because it
has no preceding whitespace. After fixing this, opening a file yields
an error because `net` is not an option. (`noet`, however, is.)
This implementation doesn't work as well as WIN32 futexes. This code
path was only added back when we were having issues with set context
however that's been solved so we can go back to the much better code
- 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.
This change deletes mkfifo() so that GNU Make on Windows will work in
parallel mode using its pipe-based implementation. There's an example
called greenbean2 now, which shows how to build a scalable web server
for Windows with 10k+ threads. The accuracy of clock_nanosleep is now
significantly improved on Linux.
- 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.
Thanks to @autumnjolitz (in #876) the Cosmopolitan codebase is now
acquainted with Apple's outstanding ulock system calls which offer
something much closer to futexes than Grand Central Dispatch which
wasn't quite as good, since its wait function can't be interrupted
by signals (therefore necessitating a busy loop) and it also needs
semaphore objects to be created and freed. Even though ulock is an
internal Apple API, strictly speaking, the benefits of futexes are
so great that it's worth the risk for now especially since we have
the GCD implementation still as a quick escape hatch if it changes
Here's why this change is important for x86 XNU users. Cosmo has a
suboptimal polyfill when the operating system doesn't offer an API
that let's us implement futexes properly. Sadly we had to use that
on X86 XNU until now. The polyfill works using clock_nanosleep, to
poll the futex in a busy loop with exponential backoff. On XNU x86
clock_nanosleep suffers from us not being able to use a fast clock
gettime implementation, which had a compounding effect that's made
the polyfill function even more poorly. On X86 XNU we also need to
polyfill sched_yield() using select(), which made things even more
troublesome. Now that we have futexes we don't have any busy loops
anymore for both condition variables and thread joining so optimal
performance is attained. To demonstrate, consider these benchmarks
Before:
$ ./lockscale_test.com -b
consumed 38.8377 seconds real time and
0.087131 seconds cpu time
After:
$ ./lockscale_test.com -b
consumed 0.007955 seconds real time and
0.011515 seconds cpu time
Fixes#876
- 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 changes *NSYNC to allocate waiters on the stack so our locks don't
need to depend on dynamic memory. This make our runtiem simpler, and it
also fixes bugs with thread cancellation support.
- Now using 10x better GCD semaphores
- We now generate Linux-like thread ids
- We now use fast system clock / sleep libraries
- The APE M1 loader now generates Linux-like stacks
- Clean up sigaction() code
- Add a port scanner example
- Introduce a ParseCidr() API
- Clean up our futex abstraction code
- Fix a harmless integer overflow in ParseIp()
- Use kernel semaphores on NetBSD to make threads much faster
- Change IDT code so kprintf() isn't mandatory dependency
- Document current intentions around pthread_cancel()
- Make _npassert() an _unassert() in MODE=tiny
Doing this makes binaries tinier, since we don't need to have all the
extra code for supporting a 32-bit address space. It also benefits us
because we're able to use WIN32 futexes, which makes locking simpler.
b69f3d2488 is what officially ended our
Windows 7 support. This change is merely a formalization. You can use
old versions of Cosmo now and forevermore if you need Windows 7 since
our repository is hermetic and vendors all its dependencies.
Won't fix#617
