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 |
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calls | ||
crt | ||
dns | ||
elf | ||
fmt | ||
integral | ||
intrin | ||
isystem | ||
log | ||
mem | ||
nexgen32e | ||
nt | ||
proc | ||
runtime | ||
sock | ||
stdio | ||
str | ||
sysv | ||
testlib | ||
thread | ||
time | ||
tinymath | ||
vga | ||
x | ||
ar.h | ||
assert.h | ||
atomic.h | ||
complex.h | ||
cosmo.h | ||
dce.h | ||
disclaimer.inc | ||
dos.internal.h | ||
empty.s | ||
errno.h | ||
imag.internal.h | ||
inttypes.h | ||
iso646.internal.h | ||
libc.mk | ||
limits.h | ||
literal.h | ||
mach.internal.h | ||
macho.internal.h | ||
macros.internal.h | ||
math.h | ||
notice.inc | ||
notice.internal.h | ||
paths.h | ||
README.md | ||
stdalign.internal.h | ||
stdbool.h | ||
stdckdint.h | ||
temp.h | ||
testlib-test.txt | ||
type2str.h | ||
zip.internal.h |
Cosmopolitan Standard Library
This directory defines static archives defining functions, like
printf()
, mmap()
, win32, etc. Please note that the Cosmopolitan
build configuration doesn't link any C/C++ library dependencies
by default, so you still have the flexibility to choose the one
provided by your system. If you'd prefer Cosmopolitan, just add
$(LIBC)
and $(CRT)
to your linker arguments.
Your library is compromised of many bite-sized static archives. We use the checkdeps tool to guarantee that the contents of the archives are organized in a logical way that's easy to use with or without our makefile infrastructure, since there's no cyclic dependencies.
The Cosmopolitan Library exports only the most stable canonical
system calls for all supported operating systems, regardless of
which platform is used for compilation. We polyfill many of the
APIs, e.g. read()
, write()
so they work consistently everywhere
while other apis, e.g. CreateWindowEx()
, might only work on one
platform, in which case they become no-op functions on others.
Cosmopolitan polyfill wrappers will usually use the dollar sign naming convention, so they may be bypassed when necessary. This same convention is used when multiple implementations of string library and other performance-critical function are provided to allow Cosmopolitan to go fast on both old and newer computers.
We take an approach to configuration that relies heavily on the
compiler's dead code elimination pass (libc/dce.h
). Most of the
code is written so that, for example, folks not wanting support
for OpenBSD can flip a bit in SUPPORT_VECTOR
and that code will
be omitted from the build. The same is true for builds that are
tuned using -march=native
which effectively asks the library to
not include runtime support hooks for x86 processors older than
what you use.
Please note that, unlike Cygwin or MinGW, Cosmopolitan does not achieve broad support by bolting on a POSIX emulation layer. We do nothing more than (in most cases) stateless API translations that get you 90% of the way there in a fast lightweight manner. We therefore can't address some of the subtle differences, such as the nuances of absolute paths on Windows. Our approach could be compared to something more along the lines of, "the Russians just used a pencil to write in space", versus spending millions researching a pen like NASA.