this is something of a tradeoff, as now set*id() functions, rather
than pthread_create, are what pull in the code overhead for dealing
with linux's refusal to implement proper POSIX thread-vs-process
semantics. my motivations are:
1. it's cleaner this way, especially cleaner to optimize out the
rsyscall locking overhead from pthread_create when it's not needed.
2. it's expected that only a tiny number of core system programs will
ever use set*id() functions, whereas many programs may want to use
threads, and making thread overhead tiny is an incentive for "light"
programs to try threads.
with these small changes, libc functions which need to call functions
which are cancellation points, but which themselves must not be
cancellation points, can use the CANCELPT_INHIBIT and CANCELPT_RESUME
macros to temporarily inhibit all cancellation.
the problem: there is a (single-instruction) race condition window
between a thread flagging itself dead and decrementing itself from the
thread count. if it receives the rsyscall signal at this exact moment,
the rsyscall caller will never succeed in signalling enough flags to
succeed, and will deadlock forever. in previous versions of musl, the
about-to-terminate thread masked all signals prior to decrementing
the thread count, but this cost a whole syscall just to account for
extremely rare races.
the solution is a huge hack: rather than blocking in the signal
handler if the thread is dead, modify the signal mask of the saved
context and return in order to prevent further signal handling by the
dead thread. this allows the dead thread to continue decrementing the
thread count (if it had not yet done so) and exiting, even while the
live part of the program blocks for rsyscall.
for some inexplicable reason, linux allows the sender of realtime
signals to spoof its identity. permission checks for sending signals
should limit the impact to same-user processes, but just to be safe,
we avoid trusting the siginfo structure and instead simply examine the
program state to see if we're in the middle of a legitimate rsyscall.
unlocking an unlocked mutex is not UB for robust or error-checking
mutexes, so we must avoid calling __pthread_self (which might crash
due to lack of thread-register initialization) until after checking
that the mutex is locked.
this roughly halves the cost of pthread_mutex_unlock, at least for
non-robust, normal-type mutexes.
the a_store change is in preparation for future support of archs which
require a memory barrier or special atomic store operation, and also
should prevent the possibility of the compiler misordering writes.
cycle-level benchmark on atom cpu showed typical pthread_mutex_lock
call dropping from ~120 cycles to ~90 cycles with this change. benefit
may vary with compiler options and version, but this optimization is
very cheap to make and should always help some.
- there is no longer any risk of spoofing cancellation requests, since
the cancel flag is set in pthread_cancel rather than in the signal
handler.
- cancellation signal is no longer unblocked when running the
cancellation handlers. instead, pthread_create will cause any new
threads created from a cancellation handler to unblock their own
cancellation signal.
- various tweaks in preparation for POSIX timer support.
glibc made the ridiculous choice to use pass-by-register calling
convention for these functions, which is impossible to duplicate
directly on non-gcc compilers. instead, we use ugly asm to wrap and
convert the calling convention. presumably this works with every
compiler anyone could potentially want to use.
this commit addresses two issues:
1. a race condition, whereby a cancellation request occurring after a
syscall returned from kernelspace but before the subsequent
CANCELPT_END would cause cancellable resource-allocating syscalls
(like open) to leak resources.
2. signal handlers invoked while the thread was blocked at a
cancellation point behaved as if asynchronous cancellation mode wer in
effect, resulting in potentially dangerous state corruption if a
cancellation request occurs.
the glibc/nptl implementation of threads shares both of these issues.
with this commit, both are fixed. however, cancellation points
encountered in a signal handler will not be acted upon if the signal
was received while the thread was already at a cancellation point.
they will of course be acted upon after the signal handler returns, so
in real-world usage where signal handlers quickly return, it should
not be a problem. it's possible to solve this problem too by having
sigaction() wrap all signal handlers with a function that uses a
pthread_cleanup handler to catch cancellation, patch up the saved
context, and return into the cancellable function that will catch and
act upon the cancellation. however that would be a lot of complexity
for minimal if any benefit...
with this patch, the syscallN() functions are no longer needed; a
variadic syscall() macro allows syscalls with anywhere from 0 to 6
arguments to be made with a single macro name. also, manually casting
each non-integer argument with (long) is no longer necessary; the
casts are hidden in the macros.
some source files which depended on being able to define the old macro
SYSCALL_RETURNS_ERRNO have been modified to directly use __syscall()
instead of syscall(). references to SYSCALL_SIGSET_SIZE and SYSCALL_LL
have also been changed.
x86_64 has not been tested, and may need a follow-up commit to fix any
minor bugs/oversights.
this commit shuffles around the location of syscall definitions so
that we can make a syscall() library function with both SYS_* and
__NR_* style syscall names available to user applications, provides
the syscall() library function, and optimizes the code that performs
the actual inline syscalls in the library itself.
previously on i386 when built as PIC (shared library), syscalls were
incurring bus lock (lock prefix) overhead at entry and exit, due to
the way the ebx register was being loaded (xchg instruction with a
memory operand). now the xchg takes place between two registers.
further cleanup to arch/$(ARCH)/syscall.h is planned.
some of this code should be cleaned up, e.g. using macros for some of
the bit flags, masks, etc. nonetheless, the code is believed to be
working and correct at this point.
if the mutex was previously locked, we can assume pthread_self was
already called at the time of locking, and thus that the thread
pointer is initialized.
for some reason these functions are not shaded by the PS/TPS option in
POSIX, so presumably they are mandatory, even though the functionality
they offer is optional. for now, provide them in case any programs
depend on their existence, but disallow any priority except the
default.
multiple opens of the same named semaphore must return the same
pointer, and only the last close can unmap it. thus the ugly global
state keeping track of mappings. the maximum number of distinct named
semaphores that can be opened is limited sufficiently small that the
linear searches take trivial time, especially compared to the syscall
overhead of these functions.
Rich Felker